Total Pageviews

Friday, July 26, 2013

No Rapture, and Fear of 666?

Series: SOME SAY THE WORLD WILL END IN FIRE

Hi.  I’m Yolanda Ramírez, “YoYo Rez,” and I’d like to welcome you to week 3 of my four-week lecture series on approaching the Book of Revelation.

These lectures don’t actually study the book of Revelation in a formal manner.  Instead, I’ve been discussing various approaches the Body of Christ has taken to help them embrace the message of the book.

This week is Lecture III: NO RAPTURE, AND FEAR OF 666

During this talk, you’ll hear about a number of things you disagree with.  Some of them, I disagree with.  That’s part of what happens when we weigh all sides of a complex issue – we consider many things, we develop our wisdom from a variety of viewpoints and counselors, and then, when we’ve weighed them all, we embrace what seems right to us, those things that we feel are of God.  It’s fun to think about different theories and perspectives and hypotheses and ideas, but in the end there is one goal – to set our minds on the things of Christ and His things above.  Philippians 4:8 instructs us with these words from Paul: “Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report, if there be any virtue, if there be any praise, think on these things.”

To discern those things, we have to separate a lot of wheat from a lot of chaff.  That’s what maturing in Christ is all about.  So guide us, Holy Spirit, as we do that.

And away we go ...

PART A: SEARCHING FOR DUCKIES

Some of you know that I work as a governess, a live-in teacher and companion to a young girl, the daughter of an East Coast U.S. family.  The little girl I have charge over ... the most wonderful child I’ve ever met ... plays a game with me outside on cloudy days.  The game is “Find the Ducky.”  We each take turns spotting duck-shaped collections of clouds.  Whoever finds the most ducky-shaped clouds, wins … and trust me, as the game goes on, we can find the shapes of duckies anywhere and everywhere.  There we are, the innocent little schoolgirl and her older postgraduate companion, each of us able to look at random sky patterns and spot the ducks of our dreams.

And that, my friends, is a parable of how we as a modern church sometimes read the Revelation of John.

The Revelation is a book written in mysterious symbols and breathtaking visions of both glory and horror.  Almost nothing in it is literally what it says it is – the heads of dragons are hills of a city, the horns on a beast’s head are sometimes kings, sometimes symbols of power; a woman riding a beast is Rome, but then the beast she’s riding is suddenly Rome, too.  Without a clear sense of how to approach the text, the Revelation is pretty much Symbol Soup.

That’s both a good thing and a bad thing.  It’s good because we know that if we find the right keys to interpret it, the visions will make perfect sense.  After all, the book is called “Revelation” – things revealed, unveiled, made clearer.  It isn’t called “The Utterly Incomprehensible Symbol Soup of John.”

But yes, the thick symbolism of Revelation is also a negative.  That’s because we humans are pattern-seeking creatures.  When we see a row of dots, our brain wants to connect them with a line.  When we see interesting burn patterns on a piece of toast, we can sometimes make out the face of Our Lady of Guadalupe.  When we go to the store and ring up a bill of $47.65, and then on the way home see a license plate that ends with the numbers *4765* … the marvelous, wondrous brains the Lord designed for us make us WANT there to be a connection.

When I say to you, “Look, there’s a cloud that looks like a ducky,” you will look up and see the ducky.

And when I point to a passage of Scripture and say, “Look, here you will see a reference to the New World Order and the secret Illuminati behind it”  -- by golly, when you look at that Scripture, you’ll see it, plain as day.

Let me show you a non-Revelation example of that principle at work.  I’m going to post a passage for you, a pretty well known passage about the Rapture.  When I post it below, I want you to pinpoint the parts of the passage that indicate the Rapture is taking place.  It’s not a hard test, you’ll see the verses easily.  From Matthew chapter 24 –

“For as in the days that were before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day that Noe entered into the ark, and knew not until the flood came, and took them all away; so shall also the coming of the Son of man be.  Then shall two be in the field; the one shall be taken, and the other left.  Two women shall be grinding at the mill; the one shall be taken, and the other left.  Watch therefore: for ye know not what hour your Lord doth come.”

See?  It told you it was easy.  The Rapture is there in the discussion of people being left behind, others being taken.  We spotted that ducky, no problem.  It was obvious.

Here’s what would have made it a lot less obvious: If we hadn’t been taught that that verse is about the Rapture.

Suppose, for example, a favorite pastor or preacher had taught us that the passage refers to the Romans sweeping through Judea, finally putting down the Jewish rebellions – grabbing people from the fields and enslaving them, leaving others dead in the field.  What if that pastor had taught us that the warning was about the fall of Jerusalem, and advice from Jesus to the Jews of his day that if they are on their roof when the invasion came, not to go back inside to get their stuff – flee to the hills, all of them!  If they stayed in the fields or slept away the time in bed, they’d become one of the enslaved or one of the dead, whose bodies were left in the fields where the eagles would gather to scavenge their flesh.

You see how it works?  The word for that is “priming.”  If I “prime” you to see that Scripture one way, as a vague reference to the Rapture, you will easily see how it fits what I claimed.  If I prime you to see it another way, as a description of the effects of a Roman invasion, then that second way is what you’ll see.

Those of us who are mature in Christ aren't easily fooled by fancy footwork around the Scriptures.  But even if we are mature, we still have an issue to face: What if, when we were still babes in Christ, we were primed to read things in only one way?  What if that first impression wasn't the whole story?  Our first impressions are seriously stubborn … once we see a thing a certain way, our wonderful, pattern-building brains will cling to that way of seeing it.

So what are we supposed to do?  How are we to know which way to approach the slippery ideas of Scripture when it comes to the end times and the symbolism it’s always draped in?


Part B: KNOWING THE ROAD WE WALK

This is a good time for me to emphasize a point I’ve tried to make every week: None of the passages of Scripture we’re discussing have to do with salvation.  Some parts of Scripture can be tricky, requiring more study and deeper investigation.  However, the portions that deal with the most important fact of the universe – our salvation through faith in the saving power of the blood of Christ – are crystal clear, and the stuff of childlike faith.  Above all else, and despite anything I spout tonight, that Truth of Salvation is the overriding fact of our faith.

That said – getting saved is not the end of the line for a believer.  Growing in discipleship means making manifest the fruit of the Spirit and the love that is our God … love from our hearts, from our souls, from our strength ... and (out of order here to make my point) from our minds.  We are called to manifest God through our thinking, and studying, and learning.  In fact, whole sections of our sacred Scriptures are called the “Wisdom Books” – manifestations of the principle that intelligence and learning start with fear of the Lord, and grow on from there.  We are to use our brains.

Last week I outlined 4 possible approaches to understanding the Revelation.   All of them come from the beliefs of orthodox, born-again believers.  They could be classified as:

  • FUTURISM: The belief that everything in Revelation has yet to happen, and will take place in a single era in the church’s future.
  • HISTORICISM: The belief that the events symbolized in Revelation cover the entire span of history from after Jesus’ ascension until the last days.
  • PRETERISM: The belief that nearly all of Revelation was fulfilled at the fall of Jerusalem, the destruction of the Temple, and the end of the Old Covenant.
  • IDEALISM: The belief that Revelation is symbolic for every age and era in the church, continuously fulfilled until the final generation and coming.

 If you were discipled in your walk to think like a Preterist, you will have a hard time seeing the sense of the Futurist approach.  If you were schooled as a Historicist, the Idealism approach will strike you as wishy-washy and too “fluffy” to satisfy you.  Remember how I opened – if you expect to see ducky clouds, you won’t easily see horsey clouds; it will be ducks, all the way down.  But let’s take a few moments to open our minds and consider our favorite clouds from a different perspective – because each of these approaches has specific strengths, as well as weaknesses.

Part C: FUTURISM

Good news out of the United Kingdom – a new baby has been born, the first Prince of Cambridge in hundreds of years!  You might have seen it mentioned on television.

But even better – within 24 hours of his birth, I had already found the first YouTube video discussing that this new bundle of British joy is a serious candidate for being the Antichrist.  I also found another site that played with the mathematics of the day and hour of his birth to tie him to the number 666.  In other words -- before this child even had a name or a Wikipedia page, he’d been assigned a title and a number to make him a part of End Time prophecy.

Welcome … to the wonderful world of radical Futurism. J

I said last week that “Futurism” is currently the most popular way to approach the Revelation of John.  Its appeal began to rise in the U.S. in the 1820s, overcoming several hundred years during which “Historicism” was the preferred way to understand the End Times.

The appeal of approaching Revelation from a Futurist mindset is so obvious that it almost doesn’t need stating: Obviously, Christ has not come back yet, so the fulfillment of End Times prophecies MUST be in the future.  We’re not living in a Millennial Kingdom seated in Jerusalem.  The moon has not darkened and the sun has not gone out, stars have not fallen from the sky.  We Christians do not yet rule the planet, and our warrior Christ has not revealed Himself to take control of the nations.  Since this troubled world can’t be fixed by human power, we require the apocalyptic destruction of all nations and civilizations … although we ourselves will be spared that tribulation, caught up in clouds with Christ to avoid the worst Tribulation ever and the utter punishment of all bad people, in those ways graphically detailed in our book of Revelation.

So, the strengths of the approach are obvious, but the weaknesses should be kept in mind.

For one thing, modern Futurist thinking all focuses on the concept of a Rapture … a grabbing away of the people of God so that they will not experience tribulation over a seven-year period.   While such a “catching away” is mentioned in other passages of Scripture, it isn’t found in the Revelation.  Even if you’re hunting for it in the text, it’s rather hard to see, and it depends on some fancy footwork by the person who insists there’s a Rapture there.  When various commentators try to show the Rapture in the text of the Revelation, you can really get the feeling you’re being shown cloud duckies.

Meanwhile, most of the other Scriptures referencing a Rapture talk about it as the moment all death ends, the twinkling-of-an-eye change of the living and dead into spiritual bodies in Christ.  It’s difficult, in these other Scriptures, to see any distinction between what we call the Rapture and what Christ calls his final coming and the defeat of death.  When Paul talks about it, the moment of translation seems to be the last moment of human time, not the first day in a Tribulation that kills a whole lot more people even after death has been defeated.

Another major hurdle to the Futurist approach is the very first line of the Revelation – the verse that insists that the things described in the book must soon [quickly, immediately, shortly] come to pass.

Soon.  Quickly.  Immediately.  Shortly.

Of our four approaches to Revelation, Futurism is the only one that struggles with the meaning of that verse.  Enemies of our faith latch on to that word, "soon," and mock our hopes, reminding us that almost two thousand years of waiting can hardly be considered “soon.”

WARNING: Remember that I am presenting both sides, strengths and weaknesses.  If you just felt the urge to begin assembling counter-arguments, I applaud you, because you are loving the Lord with your whole mind.  But I also urge you to continue focusing, even if this is new territory for you.  Truth will remain true, and it will wait for us to get there. Continue with me as we weigh the strengths and weaknesses of each approach.  END OF WARNING.

I’ll give one final consideration about Futurism.  I’ll ask, “What fruit does this mindset bear?”  In other words, how does this way of interpretation manifest itself in the church of Christ?  Is the fruit good, or bad?

Clearly, there is very good fruit to come from a Futurist mindset.  This approach keeps us focused on Christ, and maintains our hope in His final victory, yet to come.  It keeps us ready and keeps us ever mindful that we should live as if the end will come unexpectedly, a thief in the night.  We are urged to share the Gospel, never knowing how much time we have left to reveal the Lord to others.

But Futurism also has its down side, which I've already hinted at.  If misapplied, Futurism can foster a paranoid, suspicious mentality, the exact opposite of Christ’s admonition that when we see signs of the end, not to worry.  Within Christianity, "Apocalypse Obsession" is simply a reflection of the secular, worldly "Paranoid Conspiracy Theory" obsession – the worries of the world dressed up in Bible verses, and unable to distinguish a Mayan Calendar and a quatrain of Nostradamus from the Holy Spirit-inspired words of the Gospels and of John.  I myself have heard preachers in the virtual world community of Second Life speaking of how a Planet X, called Nibiru, is going to slam into us on December 21, 2012 (oops)  and start the Tribulation under the New World Order.  That’s Babylonian mythology, mixed with Mayan mythology, mixed with Biblical prophecy, mixed with contemporary American mythology.  I’m a girl who loves her Symbol Soup, but that’s too many calories even for me.

In some cases, the paranoia can grow one level more, into what I call Pop Paranoia.  Here’s my “Bigwordism” of the week:

"Hexakosioihexekontahexaphobia."

It’s the technical term for “fear of the number 666.”  When I was very little, Ronald and Nancy Reagan moved to a post-presidential residence in Bel Air, California at 666 St. Cloud Road.  Before moving in, they had the town change the house number to 668, precisely because they knew what kind of grief they'd be in for if they didn't.  No, not grief from living under a cursed number; grief from the evangelical community, and derision from the culture at large.  It was already bad enough that the president had 666 tied to his name from birth (Ronald, 6 letters, Wilson, 6 letters, Reagan, 6 letters).  They didn’t want to compound the issue by actually living in the Home of the Beast right there in California, the State of Sin.

That might be a cute example of Pop Paranoia, but what the Reagans were up against was anything but cute.  Too many evangelicals of a Futurist ideology respond to triple sixes with a level of paranoia that brings derision on the believing community.  Maybe I’m guilty of it, too.  I always notice when my grocery bill comes to $66.66 … or $166.62 … or $60.66.  I always wonder if I should drive a little bit farther when I’ve parked with the odometer ending with sixty-six point six miles.  Never mind that none of those really equals 666, literally.  And never mind that the number 666 in the Revelation is not itself literal but a code for the name of a man.  I invite you to laugh at me, because I am a creature of my culture, whose head says seeing a grouping of sixes means nothing, but whose heart always wonders.

I’m glad I’ve never been issued a credit card that ends with the digits 0666 – because the rational part of me only goes so far.

Part D: PRETERISM

A believer who approaches the Revelation with a Preterist interpretation doesn’t worry about the number 666.  He looks at it and says, “Ah, look at that, the code for Nero Caesar when you transliterate his name to Hebrew and apply the ancient counting system to it.”

The Preterist doesn’t wonder when the events of Revelation are going to happen.  He believes that Revelation already told him the time table – right there in Revelation 17, where John writes that the 7-headed beast is 7 hills (the seven hills east of the River Tiber, upon which Rome was built), and which John says are also seven kings – five already fallen (Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, Nero), one who now is (Vespasian, after a bunch of chaos following Nero’s death), and one that has not yet come (Domitian, who outdid even Nero in his persecution of the followers of Christ).

That’s what the word “preterist” means – past.  If you studied Spanish or French in school, you might remember the preterit verb conjugation, the form used for an event that began and ended completely in the past.

For the Preterist, John is obviously saying that all of this was going on right in his own time, while he was writing – the seven-headed beast was political Rome, not some future Roman Catholic Papacy, and the Whore of Babylon riding upon that very beast also had to be existing at that time, since she was on that very beast.  To the mind of the Preterist, it's a little arrogant of modern Christians to presume that the Revelation was written for modern times, ripped from our own headlines.  Every symbol can be traced to an event in John’s own time, and the Day of the Lord came when Jerusalem fell to the forces of Rome in 70 A.D., ending Israel's exclusive claim to the eternal covenant with the Lord.  The Day of the Lord, says the Preterist, was the "End of the Age" from the viewpoint of the nation of Israel – a hugely significant act in the history of the faith, which will only be surpassed by the "End of the World," of the cosmos, when Christ finally comes to end death.

First let me deal with the strengths of this approach.

It clearly handles the “things that must happen soon” issue.  For the Preterist, the bulk of Revelation deals with the world at the time John was writing, and predicts exactly what happened with the fall of Jerusalem and the end of Israel as a nation.  The Preterist approach also helps us make sense of some of Jesus’ assurances that “this generation” he was addressing would not pass away until everything He said about the end of the age (not the end of the world) came to pass.  In Futurism, that statement by Jesus has to be played with to make it work, reinterpreting what the word “this” means – a trick that is way too painful a reminder of President Clinton changing the meaning of what “is”  is, and not helpful once you realize that in other places Jesus says that there were those listening to him who would “not taste death” until the end of the age came.

Still, Preterism has some obvious problems.  It’s most glaring issue is that it suggests multiple stages to the coming of Christ – one at the end of the age (of Israel), and another at the end of the world, when death is defeated.  If you press a Preterist on this point, he’ll likely say it’s obvious that there were two different events being considered by those writing down prophecy … but, frankly, I suspect it’s only obvious to them because they’ve decided what ducks they were looking for in that particular bank of clouds.

More important, at least in my opinion, is that a Preterist has to spiritualize some parts of “end of the age” prophecy to make it all work for him.  For example, consider Matthew 24 when it speaks of the Son of Man coming in clouds of glory in judgment over his enemies, being seen by all the tribes of the Earth.  (I continue to refer to Matthew 24 because it’s a favorite of both Futurists and Preterists in their explanations of why their side of the discussion is better).   Here, a Preterist will use Scripture to interpret Scripture, pointing out that “God coming on the clouds” is not a literal phrase in the Old Testament, and should not be considered so here – in the Hebrew scriptures, it always referred to God passing judgment on an enemy of Israel.  Likewise, the idea that he is seen by “all the tribes of the Earth” is no more literal than when Augustus Caesar, according to Luke, decreed that “all the world” should be taxed.  "The Son of Man coming in the clouds and seen by all the tribes of the Earth" is, for the Preterist, a way of saying “many shall see this horrible event happen to Jerusalem,” if read properly.

You can probably already see the problem with that.  A clever talker can dance around nearly any line in Scripture, turning it into a figurative saying when the literal meaning is too inconvenient.  I’m not saying the Preterist is absolutely wrong to interpret some texts in a spiritual or metaphorical way … but I am saying that it’s a tricky affair, and that there need to be much more reliable rules of interpretation if we’re going to take that approach to the Scriptures.  Simply pointing to another Scripture ... in another context, written hundreds of years and hundreds of miles away ... smacks of rationalizing more than it does of sound, reliable interpretation of the Word.

What is the fruit of Preterism?  Since it isn’t as popular as Futurism these days, it’s tougher to point at any widespread outcome to using it as an approach.  Still, we’re bright people, so we can consider where it might lead, should it become the favored approach some time in the future.

First the good fruit.  By its very nature, evangelical Preterism is optimistic.  The world doesn’t need to become utterly horrible and fall into abject evil before the coming of Christ, and the church can work to fulfill, literally, the prophecy of both Isaiah and Habakkuk, which see a future where “of the increase of His government and of peace, there shall be no end.”  As a Preterist spreads the gospel, the peace that it brings will actually overcome the world.  Sharing the Gospel isn’t a matter of rushing in to snatch people from the hell fires of impending catastrophe; it is, instead, the act of filling all of creation with the Gospel of peace, offering stewardship to the souls of men and bringing responsible stewardship to the creation itself.

This approach is a pleasant contrast to a recurring radical Futurist attitude that protecting the environment is wasted effort … "cut it down, burn it up, use it while you’ve got it, because it will all be destroyed soon at Christ’s return."  Some evangelical Futurists even use apocalyptic imagery to demonize environmental efforts, calling them “The Green Dragon.”  If you think I’m exaggerating, do a Google search after the lecture on “Why Pastor Mark Driscoll says he drives an SUV.”  Pay special attention to comments by his fans.

But like all the approaches we'll consider, Preterism has potential negative fruit, too.  With no sense of urgency and no press of time, a Preterist’s approach to sharing the gospel might be a lot more laid back than the Kingdom requires.  After all, if there’s no expectation of a sudden, secret Rapture of the church, then why would there be a rush to get out there and win the lost?  A Preterist risks an attitude of laziness, a way-too-mellow approach to preaching the Good News … and, because of that lack of urgency, a Preterist may fail to carry the message to all who need it, due to a false sense of security.

(Similar dangers have been mentioned in connection to extreme Calvinists – if everyone to be saved is elected from before the foundation of the world, then what urgency is there to preach the Gospel?  Those who will be saved … will be saved, without human effort.  Preaching is just us, going through the motions.)

So, FUTURISM – a daily, expectant focus on Christ as the center of each moment, carrying the risk of falling into paranoia about every world event.

And PRETERISM – an optimistic view of the ever-increasing peace and authority of the Lord on the Earth, carrying the risk of lazy surrender and a loss of urgency.

I’ve tried to present both the “up” sides and the “down” sides of each mindset.  Still, I didn’t even scratch the surface of the very loud, very not-friendly debates the two sides can have with each other over the jots, tittles, dust, and details of their arguments.  If you’ve researched the viewpoints for yourself, you already know how vehement each camp can get – extreme futurists view Preterists as forces of Satan, deluding believers into false security in the face of immediate supernatural danger, while extremist Preterists view Futurists as shallow, uneducated, readers of the Word who do no study and who arrogantly see themselves written into every End Time prophecy.

Mind you, most us in the Body of Christ are thoughtful non-extremists when it comes to matters not tied directly to salvation by faith in the sacrifice of Christ.  But just a heads up if you investigate this study further: the Internet is a scary medium of very loud extremists on either side.

Test your sources, and test the spirit of their testimonies.

CONCLUSION

“Hey, YoYo!” I hear someone thinking, “you skipped two of the approaches, Historicism and Idealism!”  Indeed I did, because I like to contrast those two on their own. They get their own, final week next Thursday.  Historicism is the meat and potatoes of Reformation theologians; Idealism is the stuff of mystics and their allegories.  For that reason, I like to square them off against each other as if they were as different as day and night, as different as up and down, as different as men and women.  The final lecture of this series, therefore, is: “The Revelation: Hard-headed Boys vs. Fuzzy-minded Girls.”  I hope you can make it for the finale!

Marana Tha,

Cosmic Parx

Saturday, July 20, 2013

Almost Banned from the Bible

This is the second in a series of lectures I presented in the virtual world called Second Life, at the sim called House of Prayer.  This lecture was delivered on July 18, 2013.

I’m Yolanda Ramírez, “YoYo Rez,” and I’d like to welcome you to God’s House of Prayer.  This is the second of four 45-minute lectures I’ll be delivering on how to begin reading the book of Revelation.  If this is your first time at this lecture series on Revelation, great to see you!  Those of you who were here last week … I’m pleased to be present for your personal Second Coming.    As I mentioned last week, this isn’t a study of the Revelation.  We won’t be doing a systematic investigation of each chapter, verse by verse.  Instead, this short lecture series is about the Revelation … tonight, specifically, about how it had such a hard time getting into the Bible, and how the Body of Christ has developed 4 distinct approaches to help us understand what its wild visions and crazy symbols are all about.

This week is Lecture II: ALMOST BANNED FROM THE BIBLE!

And away we go …

Part A: YOLANDA TRANSLATES SOME GREEK

The Revelation is a challenge for us from first word to last.  Most of us can’t even get the title right … for years I threw an –S at the end of the title, until I discovered that absolutely no version of the Bible shows it as anything other than singular, “Revelation.”  So at first, I couldn’t even get the title of the book right.

Then came the problem of the author.  And for that little hurdle, I’d like to tell you a short story from my own life.

Once upon a time, I discovered that the Bible has grammar errors in it.

I was sitting in the back of a dim, dusty University office, working to translate the ancient Greek manuscript provided to me by my equally dusty professor.  Greek is the original language of the New Testament.  The manuscript I worked on was the APOKALUPSIS IOANNOU, the “Revelation of John.”  That manmade title always bothered me, because the first three words of the book are APOKALUPSIS IESOU XRISTOU, the “Revelation of Jesus Christ.”  The book isn’t a revelation from John; it’s a revelation to John, from (of) Jesus.

More accurately, it was, as the first verse says, a revelation from God, about Jesus Christ, sent through an angel to the servant John for the rest of us servants.  No other book in the Bible opens with such a detailed chain of custody of its message.

But, no matter.  I wasn’t worried about that on this day, ten years ago.  I was worried about my translation.  It was not going well.  I had only been studying Greek for a year and a half.  I was not good at it.

The professor saw my frustration.  He waddled over to see why I looked so upset with the translation.

On my tablet, I wrote to him, “I keep messing up my verb conjugations!  It’s like I can’t remember them!”

 “Conjugations” – my SL friend Ghostwitness would call that one of the “BigWordisms” I like to use all the time.  “Conjugation” is just a fancy word for how you make a verb work right.  For example, in English, we don’t say “He are” or “He am” – the correct conjugation is “He is.”  We learn that as children, and we don’t think much about it until someone starts using it incorrectly.

So, “conjugation.” Y’all done gots that?

My professor was a brilliant man, but no one would call him charming.  He looked at my work and crisply announced: “Your Greek’s right.  The author’s wrong.”

That confused me.  The line I was working on used a singular subject with a plural verb – “He are” would be an English example of that kind of mistake.  The Revelation had a number of other grammar issues just like it, and I wasn’t willing to assume it was the Sacred writer and not the noobie Greek student, me.

 “He didn’t know Greek well,” my professor announced.  “It was his second language.  He messes it up sometimes.  Just like you.”

I felt more confused now.  A few weeks back, the professor and I had translated the first few chapters of the Gospel of John, from the same author, and there were no such grammar errors in that piece of writing.  In fact, it was beautiful, elegant, accurate Greek, following all the rules.  Had the Apostle John forgotten how to write Greek?  Had he unlearned a language he knew perfectly well earlier in life?  Had he grown feeble minded?

Then my professor said, “Don’t be a dimwit.  Who told you it was the same John?”

And that was the day I realized that the world has a lot of people named John in it … and that the author of the Revelation never once refers to himself as an Apostle who knew the Lord Jesus Christ personally, in the flesh.  From the viewpoint of the original language, the John who wrote the Revelation used a quality of and style of Greek completely different from the John who wrote the Gospel.

The idea that the John who wrote the Gospel is the same one who wrote the Revelation is a tradition of men.

I’ll say that again, because it’s an important part of the story tonight: the idea that John of Patmos is the same person as John the Evangelist, the Gospel writer, is a non-biblical tradition.

Scripture nowhere says they are the same individual.  And while we modern Christians have a lot of “lives of the Apostles”  stories, most of those stories come from people who lived hundreds of years after the apostles had all died.

Now, wait a second.  Language difference?  Is that really enough evidence to say that the same John didn’t write both books?

Consider: You don’t have to be a language professional to draw similar conclusions from more modern examples.

EXAMPLE 1:  Imagine you are an immigration officer who pulls over one of my 80,000 Ramírez relatives – we Ramírezes are all cousins, you see.  When you check for his Arizona ID, he might say something in his rich, Mexican accent like: “Hallo!  I am call myself John, and I am swear I be born of United States, Mr. Officer!”  Let’s face it: From the style and quality of his language, you know something is up.

EXAMPLE 2: Or let’s imagine you get a text message from your significant other on a Tuesday that reads, “My dearest one: How I have missed you so, and how I long to take you once again in my embrace and share in silence the solitude of two souls joined as one.”  On Wednesday, you get a second text that says, “Yo, waddup shawty?  U still be my HOTNESS, smexy one!  So when we is to get the grope on?  U tell, scrap!”  You know immediately that something is up.  You know that John of the Embrace might not be the same as John of the Hood, and neither of them is Juan of the Barrio.

There are people, Bible scholars, who know the Greek of the New Testament far better than you and I ever will.  Those people see the same kinds of differences, and more, in the style and quality of the languages used in the Gospel of John versus the Revelation of John.  Simply put: The Gospel writer knew Greek well, as a first language.  The Revelation writer did not.

We either have to conclude that John the Evangelist forgot how to write Greek in the years between the Gospel and the Revelation, or that we’ve found ourselves a different John.

Here’s the lesson I took from that new information I got about the Revelation: Always question what I think I know.  Always pay polite attention to what people tell me about the last book of the Bible, and prayerfully consider what they have to say … but verify, verify, verify.  I will never forget that I couldn’t even get past the title and author of Revelation without learning I had major assumptions that were completely wrong.  I continue to tell myself what my professor told me that day: “Yolanda, don’t be a dimwit.”

Part B: WHAT DOES IT MATTER WHO WROTE IT?

Maybe you’re thinking, “So what?  It doesn’t matter if John the apostle wrote the Revelation, just as it doesn’t matter whether Paul the apostle wrote Hebrews.  The Holy Spirit inspired both.  They’re both in the Bible, so they’re part of my faith.”  And I’m with you on that – I believe as you do, that it is part of the canon of Scripture.

“Canon,”  another BigWordism, despite only having five letters in it.  It’s a regulation or law declared by a church council – and the “canon of Scripture” is the list of books declared legitimately part of the Bible we use today. 

To explain what that has to do with the Revelation, I’ll tell you another story.

Once upon another time … much, much longer ago than my University days … there were a bunch of Christians scattered throughout the Roman Empire who did not have a Bible.  All they had were letters and scrolls and writings that were of special importance to them.  Some were writings from Apostles like Paul and Matthew and Peter.  Some were from non-apostles like Clement and Ignatius and Polycarp.  A small church congregation was lucky to have even a single copy of one of these letters, and there was no such thing as a “whole Bible.”  No one had officially picked which ones should be in, and which ones should be out.

How do you assemble a Bible?  How do you know which books to put in?  I won’t get overly detailed on the process, because frankly, most Christians approach this topic the way they approach their favorite sausages.  Yes, I said their favorite sausages … we’re happy with the end product, but we really don’t want to see how it was made.  It’s messy.  We don’t want to know what almost got in there.  Leave that little secret to the sausage makers.

Rather than toss around names like “Eusebius” and “Athanasius,” allow me to give you the Reader’s Digest version:

·         Some dudes wrote up lists of what they wanted in a final, official book.
·         Some other dudes wrote up other lists.
·         These “dudes” were called church fathers.
·         Their lists didn’t always agree.
·         They argued.  They argued a lot.  It got ugly, uglier than modern debates over who will bring what to next Sunday’s pot luck church dinner.
·         And in the middle of the 300s C.E., a Catholic council finalized the list.  We had a New Testament.  The end.

Just so you get a perspective on how long that took: Imagine, those of you in America, that our founding fathers had sat down to create the U.S. Constitution, and that it had taken as long as it took the church fathers to agree on the contents of the New Testament.  Finishing and approving our Constitution would have taken from the late 1700s until the end of the 21st century.  Our grandchildren would be the first to have a finished version.  The discussions and debates over what belonged in the New Testament took that long.

One of the books most under debate – on many of the early lists, kicked off of others – was the Revelation.  Half of the church fathers saw it as a glorious tale of Christ’s ultimate victory over sin and evil.  The other half considered it a lunatic hallucination filled with ranting and delusion.

Obviously, the Revelation got into the Bible at the end.  But … one of the strongest arguments in the book’s favor turns out to be wrong.  Many of the list makers argued that the Revelation was written by the Apostle John.  For that reason, they said, the book deserved to be in the Bible.

Others argued that the book was too insane, and that the Greek was too poor to be the same writing as the Apostle John’s.  They feared the crazy symbolism of the book would be misused by readers and preachers, randomly applied to anything and everything they had a political opposition to.  In time, though, even those who didn’t believe that the Apostle John had written the Revelation began to soften on accepting it.  You didn’t HAVE to be an apostle to be inspired by the Holy Spirit to write for the Bible.  In fact, the man who wrote more words than anyone else for the accepted New Testament wasn’t an apostle at all, and probably not even Jewish –Luke, sidekick to an apostle, author of a gospel and The Acts of the Apostles.

So, these Catholic councils gave a final thumbs-up to 27 books, and the “canon,” the official list, was closed.  The Revelation squeaked by, mostly because a majority of council members mistakenly believed it was written by the Apostle John the Evangelist.  And luckily, since most of the world stayed illiterate for the next millennium, nobody had to worry about too many crazy interpretations from unschooled believers.

But then along came the Reformation and Martin Luther, who started kicking books out of the Bible.  Once more, the Revelation was in danger, and came close to being banned.  Martin Luther looked at it and declared, “ You know what?  I doubt the Apostle John wrote this thing.” 

But for Luther, the issue wasn’t language.  Luther had no love at all for the message of the Revelation.  He felt it was too confusing to be the Word of God, and declared, “I miss more than one thing in this book, and it makes me consider it neither apostolic nor prophetic.”  He doubted that it was inspired by God, declaring, “I can in no way detect that the Holy Spirit produced it.”  And in his most powerful dismissal of all, he claimed that the Jesus it portrays was not a Jesus found in the rest of the Bible: “Christ is neither taught nor known in it,” he wrote.

We nearly lost the book of the Revelation at that point.  That’s no exaggeration.  Many books DID depart from the Protestant canon in those days, the early 1500s, including many Old Testament books now found only in the Catholic Bible.  But oddly, eight years after his dismissal of Revelation, Luther did a complete turnabout.  His attitude toward the Revelation changed, because he began to see a very powerful use for the book – it made a great weapon against his Number One Enemy, the Roman Catholic Church.  The Warrior Christ he’d been uncomfortable with earlier in life suddenly made sense to Luther – and the Beast from the Sea was all too obviously, to him, the Roman Church itself.  The Church, for its part, quickly responded by interpreting the rise of a False Prophet to be Luther, raging against the real Kingdom of God.  Lines were drawn, symbols were adopted, and the Revelation of John rested easily, again having a fixed place in the canon, and remaining there to our day.

Printing presses churned out copies of the Bible.  The Word of God became available throughout the world … and, I’m required to point out, the Revelation became widely available to the crazy commentators and interpreters that the ancient church fathers had feared.  The scholar G.K. Chesterton made a wonderful statement about that, saying that although the author John “saw many strange monsters in his vision, he saw no creature so wild as one of his own commentators.”


Part C: THE FOUR APPROACHES TO REVELATION

Once upon a time … long before I sat there translating in that University office, and long before Martin Luther changed his mind about the Revelation, and even before the church fathers finalized their list of the books that belonged in the New Testament, a man named John on an island named Patmos sat down to record a vision that would far outlive him, and far outlive even the memories of who he was.  As he wrote his first line about his vision, those “things which must shortly come to pass,” he could not imagine that two thousand years later, people would still be debating about those things he saw.

When I say that the Body of Christ has developed “approaches to interpreting Revelation,” some people might think that I am talking about ideas like, “Will the Rapture occur before or after the tribulation, or will it come right in the middle of it?”  But those matters are mere details that relate only to a single one of the four approaches I want to introduce.  They are details Martin Luther wouldn’t have recognized, since they come from a Futurist approach completely different from his own.

The four approaches I’m introducing are called:
·         Futurism
·         Historicism
·         Preterism
·         Idealism

Before I mention their differences, I would like to point out their similarities: All four of these approaches believe in the literal, physical second coming of Christ in our future, when the world ends and the temporal is replaced by the eternal.  All of them share the belief that fullness of the Kingdom is yet to come.  And most important, all four declare that salvation is through faith in Christ’s redeeming sacrifice alone, the one defining element uniting us, so that one day, a trillion years from now, we can all sit around laughing about how little we knew back in those Old Earth Days.

Here are the approaches.  I’ll hint at strengths and weaknesses in each, but the full examination will come next Thursday.

Approach 1: Futurism

I start with Futurism not because it is the oldest approach to interpreting Revelation… in fact, it might be the newest … but because it is the most popular today.  Futurism holds that Revelation is about activities at the End of Time.  All of its symbols … its two beasts, its Whore of Babylon drunk upon the wine of the blood of the saints, its mark of the beast that will allow buying and selling and damn one to hell … every seal, trumpet, and bowl of plagues is yet to happen, and the signs of the times are hints that it will happen soon.  Futurists tend to see Revelation as a secret code for the headlines of their own times.  If a major earthquake occurs, it is because the End is Near.  If a near-miss asteroid comes by our planet, it’s a reminder that another massive asteroid, Wormwood, is on the verge of slamming into us.  If a Social Security card is issued with three 6’s buried in it, in order, it becomes a reminder of the horrors that are just about to come, and evidence of dark conspiracies lurking just behind the scene.

Futurism is the backbone of the fictional Left Behind series, which has introduced a number of elements into modern Christianity’s expectations of the end times – including the mistaken assumption that the book of Revelation mentions a one-world religion, an Antichrist, and a Rapture.  None of those terms is actually found in the Revelation.

Approach 2: Historicism

Martin Luther was a Historicist, once he finally accepted the Revelation.  So were famed preachers Charles Spurgeon and John Wesley.  To a historicist, the symbols, creatures, and events of Revelation aren’t a collection of things happening in a single era.  Instead, they are a map of all history itself.  The letters to the churches at the beginning are a preview of the ages the Church will go through, and then the main bulk of the vision is all of history after Christ ascended.  The Historicist sees encoded in the Revelation the rise and the fall of the Roman Empire, the sweeping of barbarian hordes through Europe and out of Asia to pave the way for the Middle Ages, the schism of the Roman and Eastern church, followed by the rise of Protestantism and the discovery of the Americas, and perhaps even including Russia, China, and America becoming the dominant powers on the planet.

How these symbols are arranged and counted through history depends on who the historicist is and when he lived.  For Martin Luther, everything culminated in his own age, with the Pope as the Beast of the Sea and the end at hand for everyone being saved from the clutches of Babylon.  For Uriah Smith, author of the 1897 book Daniel and Revelation, it all culminates in his own time, once you count Daniel’s “weeks” as “years” and realize that the invention of the telegraph and dirigibles is most certainly a sign of the end within a generation.

Approach 3: Preterism

A number of the early church fathers, and a number of modern preachers, fall into the category of “preterist,” Eusibius being one of the earliest (he was one of those “dudes” I mentioned who created lists of what books should be in the Bible).  Calvinist theologian R.C. Sproul is a more recent prominent example.  Preterists hold to the idea that most of the book of Revelation … in fact, everything up through chapter 19 … was fulfilled in the generation following the resurrection of Christ, culminating in the fall of Jerusalem in 70 A.D.  The generation did not pass away until the fulfillment of the Day of the Lord, which is not the same as the Final Coming of Jesus.

Preterists distinguish between the End of the Age (when Israel came to final judgment) and the End of the World (when Christ will physically return to earth).  The Son of Man coming in clouds, seen by those who pierced him, becomes, in Preterist ideas, a different event from the Final coming of Christ.  The Old Testament spoke various times of God “coming in the clouds” as a way of indicating God was leveling Israel’s enemies.  This final “coming in the clouds” was the judgment of Christ himself, executed through the Romans, marking the end of the age of Israel and the beginning of the New Israel, the church.  Horrible tribulation befell Israel, worse than any judgment ever on any nation.  We now live in the Kingdom Age, awaiting the final establishment of Christ’s throne as we unceasingly work to increase His Kingdom upon the earth.

Approach 4: Idealism

The three previous approaches suffer from one common shortcoming that’s resolved by the final approach.  The Futurist, Historicist, and Preterist approaches all require that the majority of the book of Revelation have nothing to do with the vast majority of Christians throughout the church’s history.  The Futurist says, Sorry, 2,000 years of believers, this is our secret book for our age, and you only get to wonder why it was in your Bible.  The Historicist says, Hey, there we are on page 23; the rest has nothing to do with us directly.  The Preterist says, It’s all fulfilled except the last part, so Revelation is pretty much a history book.

Idealism makes Revelation relevant, regardless of era or geography.  Idealism says that the book of Revelation is not a code about any single age – it is, instead, a collection of symbols that can and do relate to any era or crisis the church passes through.  There is always a “Beast” who rises to oppose us, be he Hitler, or Caesar, or Tariq ibn-Ziyad of the Moorish hordes conquering Christian Hispania.  Every age has oppression, and every age shows the evidence of God’s people enduring, and God acting to help us overcome trials and ultimately to punish those who defy the will of the Lord.  To the Idealist, “ Who is the Antichrist?”  is a meaningless question, better asked as “ What is the spirit of Antichrist?”   The Revelation is not one Christian Age – it is all Christian Ages, with the Two Witnesses of the Old and New Testaments standing as proof against evil until that final age when Christ’s Kingdom comes, unexpected as a thief, in its fulfillment.

This was the approach embraced by the renown St. Augustine … and it might surprise you to learn that it was the normal, majority approach to Revelation for over a thousand years.

CONCLUSION

Obviously, there’s a lot to say about each of those possible approaches.  That was a lot to take in, especially if you belong to a faith tradition that only discusses one of the four approaches.  Next week, I’ll take an in-depth look at the strengths and weaknesses of each one – without taking sides, since I am here to lecture on the teaching of others, not to directly teach by myself.

And so … I yield the alphabet.  Any comments and insights you have are now welcome.

Marana Tha,

Cosmic Parx (YoYo Rez)


Friday, July 12, 2013

Some Say the World Will End in Fire

On Thursday, July 11 of 2013, I presented a lecture at God’s House of Prayer, a sim in the virtual world called Second Life where I do most of my social media interaction.  I’ll be using this blog to post the four lectures they’ve asked me to give during the month of July.  Below you’ll find the first installment.

Lecture 1: Approaching the Approaches to Revelation

I’d like to welcome you to God’s House of Prayer.  This is the first of four 30-minute lectures I’ll be delivering on how to begin reading the book of Revelation.

Please note that it isn’t a study of the Revelation.  We won’t be doing a systematic study of each chapter, verse by verse.  Instead, this short lecture series is about the Revelation … why it’s such a difficult book to read, why it leads to so much disagreement and conflict among believers, how it ever found its way into the New Testament, and what major approaches church fathers and Bible scholars have used over the centuries to help us wrestle with its messages and meanings.

It’s all the stuff I wish I had known before I read a single verse of the book.

For those of you who are pastors, ministers, or other clergy, this might be a quaint revisiting of some of your classes from Days Gone By in seminary.

For the avid Biblical researchers among us, this will also be a review, a far-too-brief summary of the wealth of ideas that relate to the book.

But those of you who are non-researchers, non-clergy, believers growing in faith, Bible readers moving from milk to meat and starting on the path of studying to show yourself approved – you are my main audience tonight.  You are the reason I wanted to create this short lecture series.

We’ll let all those other guys, those pastors and scholars, hang around … but this lecture series is for you.

Some housekeeping before I start:

(a) Tonight’s lecture is entirely in text.  The down side of that is you don’t get to hear peppy, charismatic voice modulations from an energetic speaker.  The up side is … you can sneak off to the bathroom and not miss a thing, thanks to the wonders of scroll back.

(b) There is no note card.  The outline of the lecture is to my left, your right, so that you can gauge our progress through the talk.  I will, however, be posting the full text tomorrow at my blog, and I will make links to that available as the series continues.

(c) We’ll return to voice at the end of 30 minutes.  When I finally shut up, we’ll have a time for questions, comments, and voice discussions.

And away we go …

REVELATION: THE BOOK OF CONFLICT

When Reverend Brett first announced that I’d be giving this lecture series on the book of Revelation, an odd thing happened.  People began to contact me, friends and fellow believers.  They wished me luck with the lectures.  They told me whether or not they’d be able to make it on this day, at this time.  And more than a few of them qualified their good wishes with some version of the words: “I probably won’t agree with you, but it sounds interesting!”

And that seems a pretty normal reaction, no?

But I want you to think about it … because that very reaction tells you a LOT about the church’s 19-century-long love/hate relationship with the book of Revelation.

First of all – (1) Think how that reaction from my friends would have sounded if Brett had announced that I was lecturing on any other book of the Bible.  If the announcement had read, “YoYo Rez will be talking about the Gospel of Matthew, and four distinct ways you could approach it, based on the Church’s history of interpretation,” I’m pretty sure that no one would have said, “Well, I probably won’t agree with you, but sounds interesting.”

Similarly, at last Sunday’s House of Prayer sermon--when Brett announced that he’d be giving us insights into Ephesians 2--if I had texted in local chat, “I probably won’t agree with you, but sounds interesting,” I would have gotten a stern post-sermon talking to.

That reaction, that readiness to disagree which seemed acceptable in the context of the book of Revelation, comes off as silly at best, rude at worst, when applied to another part of the Bible.

It doesn’t sound rude when applied to the Revelation, because we as a church agree that the Revelation is divisive, a book written in conflict, interpreted in conflict, and proclaiming conflict.

Second – (2) Another fascinating thing about the reaction “I probably won’t agree with you, but it sounds interesting” is this: The announcement hadn’t mentioned a single thing I believe about the Revelation. The announcement did mentioned 4 historical approaches to interpreting the book.  It mentioned that all four would be covered.  It suggested we could learn something from each of the approaches.

But it didn’t say a word about which approach I favor.

Nonetheless, any number of my fellow believers, dear friends all, assumed they were going to disagree with me, despite my not having given the smallest clue about my preferred hermeneutic or exegesis.

This shows that the Revelation triggers emotions.  Not one of us can perform exegesis on the Revelation without first sloughing through a vast swamp of eisegesis … because more than any other book of the Bible, this is the one we were all told about before we set eyes on it.  I think most of us will admit that’s true.  First we were told what it all meant; then we tackled actually reading it.

So, this means we’re about to do a dangerous thing, those of us gathered here today.  We’re about to consider a text that for 19½ centuries has raised emotions and caused division, one that has turned brother against brother and father against son.

Happy trails to us, huh?

But there’s good news, too.  Revelation 1:3 offers a unique promise: “Blessed is the one who reads aloud the words of this prophecy, and blessed are those who hear it and take to heart what is written in it, because the time is near.”

This crazy, madcap collection of nightmares, beasts, multitudes in anguish and multitudes in glory comes with its own set of seven blessing scattered throughout its chapters … seven Revelation Beatitudes, for the Revelation uses the same Greek word for “blessed” that Jesus used with his disciples.  This first Revelation Beatitude assures us that it’s worth it to hear the Revelation declared, and to declare it aloud, no matter how strange we may find it, and no matter how many emotions it stirs or how much it threatens to cause division.

If we move past the risks, we move into those blessings.

(Side note: Those of you who missed Nak Earst's recent series on the original Beatitudes -- make him do the services for you all over again.  They're not to be missed!)

WHY IS REVELATION SO HARD TO GRASP?

I mentioned eisegesis just now.  That’s usually considered a bad approach to interpreting the Bible.  But there’s a reason we all have to approach the book of Revelation with pre-existing ideas about what it means.  In fact, there are a number of reasons.  For my purposes tonight, we’ll say that that number is exactly three.

REASON NUMBER 1: Revelation can’t be taken literally.

Many of us in the Evangelical community call ourselves literalists.  We even recall the old bumper stickers: “God Said It, I Believe It, That Settles It.”  We take a certain level of justifiable pride in the simplicity of our acceptance of the Bible, and we can handle a few similes and metaphors and statements of hyperbole in the sacred text.  Jesus, we know, isn’t really a shepherd, he is like a shepherd.  He isn’t really a vine or a door … he shares attributes with those that we need to ponder to appreciate.  He doesn’t really expect us to hate our mothers and fathers … he is making a powerful point about how deeply we need to hold our commitment to him.

We’re great Bible readers when it comes to literal passages with a sprinkling of symbolism, clearly explained.

But when we enter the world of the Revelation, all our literalist tendencies are turned on their heads.  We’re told not to be literal (“Those seven heads I just mentioned on the dragon?  They’re seven hills and seven kings too, get it, get it?”)  We’re tricked into expecting one symbol while being handed another (“Turn around and see the Lion.  Whoops!  Gotcha, the Lion you expected is really a Lamb.  Whoops!  Gotcha, the Lamb that isn’t a Lion isn’t really a Lamb either, get it, get it?”)  We’re teased with bits of information we aren’t permitted (“Whoa, do you hear those voices in the seven thunders saying really cool things?  No, don’t write them down.  Leave your readers wondering so they don’t get it, don’t get it.”)

To make matters worse, even the parts of Revelation that feel literal wind up fooling us.  Think of the 144,000 children of Israel who are sealed in chapter 7.  Many who take a Futurist approach to Revelation (one of the 4 approaches this lecture series will cover) breathe a literalist sigh of relief when they encounter that passage, and conclude that it refers to 144,000 real, literal Jews who will be saved during a future tribulation.

But take note: Revelation is again tricking our literalist minds!  Because if we take that number 144,000 literally, and if we take the Jewish identity of the crowd literally, then we would also have to take literally what the text says about where each part of that crowd came from – 12 thousand souls from each of the 12 tribes of Israel.  That is a literal impossibility, since 10 of the 12 tribes had literally disappeared by the literal time that John literally heard those words.  John would have known that while he listened.  We know it now, too, and are left as confused in our literalism as when we entered the passage.


REASON NUMBER 2: The Revelation demands extensive external knowledge.

As philosophical descendents of the Reformation, we share in a sola scriptura commitment – a belief that our scripture is a definitive source and authority for our doctrines.  That said, even the Westminster Confession of Faith recognizes that there will be parts of Scripture, unrelated to salvation, that simply aren’t easy for all believers to understand.  In its first chapter, it declares that “[a]ll things in Scripture are not alike plain in themselves, nor alike clear unto all.”

In effect: Some Scriptures require a little help to make them clear to the modern mind.

By “a little help,” we usually mean a bit of historical context or other small details that help make a text come alive.  For example, consider a non-Revelation example, the story of the Pharisees asking Jesus if it’s right to pay taxes to the Romans, and Jesus asking for a coin to point out Caesar’s picture is on the coin, meaning it belongs to him anyway.  A typical lay reader would have little trouble understanding that passage, and might perhaps require only a reminder that “Caesar” was the title of the ruler of the Romans, who were occupying Judea at that time.  Additional information might enrich the tale – for example, pointing out that a coin with a human form on it was often considered idolatrous by Pharisees, and that Jesus was making a more ironic and damning observation when he asked, “Whose face is on this coin?” after a Pharisee had been the one to hand it over.  But note: these bits of information simply enhance the story; the basic massage was clear without the information added.

The same is not true for passages in the book of Revelation.  The images in this book come so quickly, and are so bizarre, one often can’t tell where even to start.  Consider these lines from the description of the third horseman of the opened seals in chapter 6, traditionally called Famine.  We’ll start with the King James Version:

“And when he had opened the third seal, I heard the third beast say, Come and see. And I beheld, and lo a black horse; and he that sat on him had a pair of balances in his hand.  And I heard a voice in the midst of the four beasts say, A measure of wheat for a penny, and three measures of barley for a penny; and see thou hurt not the oil and the wine.”

Our first barrier is Elizabethan English.  Here, a penny is not a penny, a “measure” isn’t very descriptive to the modern mind, and there isn’t a clue what “not hurting the oil or wine” might be about.  In addition, we have a pair of balances.  What, a first-time reader will wonder, is a pair of balances?  Something out of gymnastics?

An industrious reader might decide to jump over to another version of Scripture, if his particular congregation allows that.  Being of a particularly free-spirited bent, he goes right to the other end of the biblical spectrum, the New Living Translation:

“When the Lamb broke the third seal, I heard the third living being say, "Come!" I looked up and saw a black horse, and its rider was holding a pair of scales in his hand.  And I heard a voice from among the four living beings say, ‘A loaf of wheat bread or three loaves of barley will cost a day's pay. And don't waste the olive oil and wine.’ ”

You may think that clears some matters up, but consider it from the mind of a new lay reader.  Comparing two popular versions of Scripture has raised a number of questions:

Q: Why do the versions contradict, one saying a penny and another saying a whole days pay?

Q: Why is one selling grains while the other one is selling cooked loaves of bread?

Q: Why is one talking about the oil and wine getting hurt, while the other just says it’s getting wasted?

Q: If the balances are scales, what do they represent?  Justice?  Commerce?  Weight loss?

Am I exaggerating the difficulties of that little pair of verses about the third horseman, Famine?  The older I get, the more I don’t think so.  As a teacher of high school students, I’ve come to learn that the moment you presume some piece of “universal” knowledge, you’ll run into more people than you imagined who have no clue what you’re talking about.  They won’t understand that balances means scales.  They won’t find “penny” to be a meaningless hurdle, nor will they know it comes from “dinarius,” the coin paid for a full day’s work.  They might not even pick up from the two verses that the third horseman should be called Famine.

Please note: I, for one, don’t think of the third horseman as Famine, no matter how skinny he looks on Metallica album covers or in the movie The Crow.  I think of him as “The Horseman of Vast Economic Disparity and Social Injustice Resulting from a Minor Drought.”

Here’s the external knowledge that leads me to that conclusion:

·         AGRICULTURE: Wheat and barley are shallow-rooted plants that suffer quickly in a drought.  Grapes and olives have deeper, farther-reaching roots that help them survive lighter droughts.  In a minor drought, grains perish, while olives and grapes (the source of the oil and wine in the verse) remain unharmed.
·         MICRO ECONOMICS: A laborer in the era of the Revelation was generally granted a denarius for a day’s work.  A “choinix” of wheat was considered the daily ration he needed to survive … choinix being the “measure” mentioned in the verses, and an indication that workers were living hand to mouth, with only the option of buying the cheaper, less nutritious barley if they had other mouths to feed.
·         MACRO ECONOMICS: Grains contributed to breadstuffs, the staples of the lower working classes.  Olives and wines were more of a luxury in Asia Minor (where John is writing), predominantly enjoyed by the upper classes.  The third horseman shows that staples are rare for the poor but luxuries are plentiful for the rich in this seal’s scenario.
·         HISTORY: In the era when this book was written, droughts did in fact touch the Asia Minor area, both during Nero Caesar’s reign and during the later reign of Domitian.  In the latter case, Domitian actually ordered that olive and grape production not be halted in favor of wheat and barley cultivation – a literal manifestation of an order not to harm the oil and wine.

And there you have it – the  “Third Horseman of Vast Economic Disparity and Social Injustice Resulting from a Minor Drought.”  The third horseman was not simply Famine, but a harbinger of a time when a day laborer could barely scrape by on minimum-wage dinarii, while the wealthy continued to dine in opulence, despite measures that could have been taken to withstand the minor environmental downturn.

That was a LOT of effort to put into a pair of short verses – and that was just effort spent pointing out what they really say.  We didn’t even start to get into what they might mean in the context of John’s full vision.

And don’t worry – I won’t be doing a lot of that “Microscope On The Text” approach, even though I feel that is the most fruitful way to get to the meaning of the Revelation.  My point in taking that close a look is to drive home one idea: That it is an act of irresponsibility to send a new Christian into the pages of Revelation with no pre-reading, upfront guidance, and constant supplemental support throughout the reading.

REASON NUMBER 3: It is written in a rare genre.

You may have forgotten that I was in the middle of three points.  This final one is a lot shorter -- the Revelation is written in a specific, quirky genre, one you’ve probably heard about: apocalyptic.

What do I mean when I say “genre”?  Not to turn all English teacher on you, but – a “genre” is a specific category of literary composition marked off by its unique form, style, and content.  The Bible is a collection of various genres.  The Psalms are written in the “poetry” and “song” genres.  The Chronicles are in a “historical narrative” genre.  Jeremiah is in the “prophetic” genre.  Job is in the rarer genre of “theodicy.”  Paul communicated through the “epistolary” genre, letters.  Jesus didn’t write, but according to the gospels he did teach almost exclusively in the genre of  “parable.”

And, as I mentioned, the Revelation is written in the “apocalyptic” genre.  You may even recall that the other name for the Revelation is “The Apocalypse,” a translation of the Greek word for “revelation.”  Apocalyptic was a style of literature most popular from 200 B.C.E. to 200 C.E.  (Those are B.C. and A.D., for you folks who went to college in the 20th century.)

The apocalyptic genre pops up in other parts of Scripture, most notably in portions of Joel, Zechariah, Isaiah, and of course in Daniel, extensively.  The Revelation, however, is the only book of the Bible that embraces it without interruption.  Even the opening letters to the churches at the start of Revelation – technically part of the epistolary genre – are delivered within the apocalyptic framework.  John is already in the spirit and hearing apocalyptic voices when he composes the epistles.  Revelation is all apocalyptic through and through, and the symbols it uses are part of a complex code agreed upon by writers in the genre.

What writers do I mean?  For many years, we only had a handful of non-Biblical examples of the apocalyptic genre, most notably the books of Enoch and the Assumption of Moses (both of which are directly quoted in Scripture in the Letter of Jude).  Now, thanks to the 1945 discovery of ancient documents in the Nag Hammadi region of Egypt, we have dozens of non-Biblical examples of the genre as well.

There’s only one point I want to drive home right now about apocalyptic literature.  It is not the same as prophecy.  The two “genres” are completely different in nature.  Many readers of Revelation might think they are reading prophecy with fancier symbolism and cool creatures, but there is a fundamental difference between prophetic and apocalyptic literature: Traditional Biblical prophecy is a mixture of what will happen and what might happen.  Biblical Apocalyptic is simply what must happen, no mights at all.  In apocalyptic, there is no wibble room … there are no options like those often offered in traditional prophecy, that if a person or a nation turns from their ways, they can avoid the wrath to come.

The prophetic very often provides two paths, two possibilities: the Big Bad is coming, OR you can avoid the Big Bad by turning from your ways and returning to the Lord.  Think Jonah, the case study for how God can turn from his wrath completely (and irk the prophet at the same time).

In Apocalyptic, no options remain.  Nothing can get better before it gets worse.  It’s game over.  There’s only the Big Bad, followed by a world to come.

IN CONCLUSION

When we advertised this lecture series, we said we would discuss 4 distinct approaches to reading the Revelation.  As you can see, this first week was spent approaching the approaches, without even getting there.  And to make matters worse, I got through this entire introduction without ever once saying the words “Left Behind” or “Illuminati.”  What crazy kind of introduction to Revelation is this?!

Next week, I’ll discuss the writing of the Revelation, its author, and the tough time it had making its way into the Scriptures and staying there … including Martin Luther’s own rejection of the Revelation with the words: “I can in no way detect that the Holy Spirit produced it ... Christ is neither taught nor known in it.”

After that, I will indeed begin to cover the four prominent hermeneutical models available for understanding the Revelation – Futurism, Preterism, Historicism, and Idealism.  But for now, I’d like to step back and allow people here to voice some of their own ideas, or ask any questions they might have, and maybe even get a nice, raucous, non-emotional and non-divisive discussion going.

Voicers will often say, “I yield the mic.”  Instead, I’ll say: “I yield the alphabet.”

Thank you.