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)

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 day's 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.

Satan's Own Conspiracy Theory

Ever since the Illuminati assassinated JFK to pave the way for international bankers to allow Satan to promote Muslims like Barack Obama into positions of power, the One World Government has been gearing up to set the Antichrist into place and to require digital chips to be implanted in our hands in order to buy and sell anything, including bottled fluoridated tap water for those who will be brainwashed into following the Roman Catholic mystery religion and claiming there’s global warming when really all they want is to take our guns and our traditional light bulbs.

No, really.  It’s true.  Just ask those guys in your church, the ones who say they know.

PARANOID CONSPIRACY THEORIES

Okay, that bit of playfulness aside, let me start by saying that yes, there are conspiracies.  The world is filled with people, some of them powerful, who gather in secret to attempt to make clandestine plans.  Some of them really are trying to figure out how to take your guns.  Others really are trying to make it harder for you to vote if you’re poor and black.  Conspiracies have long been real, and are evidenced throughout Scripture in examples like secret attempts to kill the Apostle Paul and secret movements to promote Absalom over David.

But Paranoid Conspiracy Theories (PCTs) are another thing altogether.  They promote delusion, are driven by fear, and, from a Biblical point of view, ring thoroughly unchristian in nature.

Conspiracies are simply secret plans being entertained or attempted by a group.  PCTs, on the other hand, are elaborate suppositional systems that leverage delusions of persecution and exaggerated self-importance to cast suspicion upon every authority or person of power and wealth.  A conspiracy can be disproved by new information (“Look, McDonalds is posting calories on their menu now; I guess they aren’t  secretly trying to make America obese.”)  A PCT, though, can never be disproved.  Every bit of disconfirming evidence is turned around to become part of the very theory it has contradicted.  (“Who says a giant dwarf star isn’t headed right at the Earth?  NASA astronomers?  Well, of course they would say that … they’re part of the cover up!  I trust amateur YouTube videos with bad spelling a thousand times more!”)

What disturbs me lately is the number of Christians I encounter who buy into conspiracy theories circulating through the global secular chat stream.  With the ease of a Haitian hoodoo practitioner adapting Catholicism to his existing magic system, Christian conspiracy theorists are embracing worldly paranoia and molding it to fit pre-existing ideas about Christian apocalypse.  Many of the End Times catastrophists among us hunt down, savor, and promote even the most outlandish ideas bouncing around among the unsaved.

Why do I view paranoid conspiracy theories as unchristian?  I’m glad you asked.  [Actually, I’m glad you let me make it seem like you asked, since I was conspiring within my own mind to make that feel as if it were the next question you’d pose.]   I’ll avoid getting overly detailed and try to present six succinct reasons I believe PCTs are against the will of the Lord.

And please be aware: Someone, somewhere, really did just say to himself: “How many reasons did she say she’d give?  Six?  Six?  Six?!  Aha!”

And I’m not joking.

REASON ONE: Paranoid Conspiracy Theories are Gnostic

From the founding of Christianity, heretic groups were eager to claim special knowledge of the path to salvation and hidden insights into the mind of God.  For such types, universally accessible information about the Lord was a simplistic thing.  Everyone can be saved?  The minds of little children can believe?  Rubbish!  The Lord must be pursued through special understandings, secret words, and difficult layers of emanations that infinitely attempt to approach the sublime divine!

Secret pathways to God are an appalling idea to Christians.  However, the Christian conspiracy theorist follows a line of reasoning disturbingly similar to that of the Gnostic.  First, a secret is learned, usually from a fellow conspiracy buff.  The Christian thrills at the new knowledge, fascinated that he’s gotten an insight that most others don’t have.  He then practices telling the secret insight to others.  Many reject his idea, and that rejection saddens him, making him fear for the future of those who can’t grasp the special knowledge.  The Christian conspiracy theorist even starts to become hostile toward those who reject his insight.  The fools!  It is so clear!  They’re in mortal danger, and refuse to see it.  In fact, they probably won't escape the trickery of the times to come, and will be lost, the poor, damned souls …

And so is born a modern day Gnosticism.  The reality, though, is that our Lord is not one who has us deal in secret plans.  The very meaning of “apocalypse” is “unveiling” --  the revealing of things previously hidden.  God, we are told in Amos 3:7, does absolutely nothing major without revealing it through His prophets, and no conspiracy of man … no hidden global force of imagined Illuminati, no Trilateral Commission or presumed Masonic Rites leading to the world's end … are going to go unmentioned in His word and undefeated by His purposes.   All things hidden are revealed to His children, and we are not caught unaware.

Only those harboring excessive, delusional self-importance think we’re in the dark.

REASON TWO: Paranoid Conspiracy Theories Exalt Satan

Those who talk on and on about secret conspiracies and demonic forces at work behind government agencies are, frankly, doing Satan’s work for him.  Satan has one chief weapon: the lie.  In a world where humans are being reborn into spiritual awakening and made new creatures in Christ every day, Satan can only push the illusion that he has extraordinary power to manipulate even the elect, if that were possible.  His tool for sustaining that illusion is the Christian paranoid conspiracy theorist.

If you suggest to a Christian PCT that Satan, albeit a prince of the air in this world still, might not be the all-powerful omni-force their paranoia suggests, you will receive hearty, wide-eyed push back.  You will be reminded that Satan runs this Earth.  You will be chided for claiming that his power is less than global.  In fact, your very faith will be questioned, and you will be invited to become a better Christian by accepting the truth of Satan’s awesome power.

You see the implications of that way of thinking, I know.  It's a scenario where confessing the devil's power becomes more important than confessing God's.  The Christian PCT will consider those who don't believe him to be lesser Christians, ones in danger for not wanting to learn more and more about the devil’s might.

REASON THREE: Paranoid Conspiracy Theories Diminish God

Well, not really.  Nothing diminishes our Lord.  But PCTs can wear away at our own hearts’ understanding of the sovereignty of our God.  I’ll make this crisp and clear: Even if every single Christian paranoid conspiracy theory were absolutely true, no matter how ridiculous an idea it might be (e.g., UFO sightings interpreted as demonic forces in spaceships flown by our lizard-people overlords), God’s plan for the end of time would not be altered one bit.  If it happens, God has accommodated it in His plan.

Theorize conspiracies all you wish, but do not act as if these things are surprises to God or to His children.  “The Lord foils the plans of the nations; he thwarts the purposes of the peoples,” says Psalm 33:10.  Perhaps we, His children, will be temporarily surprised by what the nations do, but we certainly won’t be impressed by them the way a Christian PCT wants us to be.

Try this the next time a Christian PCT wants you to be impressed by a tale of some One World Religion rearing its head.  Say: “Maybe, maybe not, but I know God is sovereign, so I’ll keep my mind focused on Him.”  The Christian PCT probably won’t contradict that, but you’ll see in his eyes and hear in his next words his desire that you buy in a little bit more, and maybe show just a little bit of fear and revulsion.  You're hearing an ear-tickling secret, after all.

REASON FOUR: Paranoid Conspiracy Theories Demean the Brethren

Isaiah 52:5 laments how God is dishonored among the Gentiles because of the misbehavior of the people of God.  With Christian PCTs embracing the conspiracies of the world, believers are likewise at risk of demeaning the honor due God, and we risk being demeaned ourselves because of how some among us embrace the fear and paranoia Satan inspires.

Consider Harold Camping and his recent declarations of the Rapture.  Consider any number of Christian preachers, catastrophists all, who tied the Mayan 2012 calendar to the divine revelation of Scripture, hinting that December 21, 2012 might be the beginning of the end because an ancient carving by those who had never heard of Yahweh did a great job calculating the rotation of the galaxy.

Think, too, of how little the world can tell the difference between a Heaven’s Gate cult predicting the end and a Hal Lindsey Late Great Planet Earth declaration that 1989 was about it, folks, and Jesus would be returning right around then.  Every preacher who says “New World Order” in a sermon; every teacher who ties the word “Illuminati” to his exegesis of the Revelation; every pastor who speaks of “American Christian persecution by government forces” is making us look foolish, and demeaning the message of the Gospel that should really be at the center of our passions.

REASON FIVE: Paranoid Conspiracy Theories Drain the Believer

So many times, I have seen Christian brothers with brilliant minds that have been trapped into counting the weeks of Daniel, guessing the nuances and identity of the seven headed, ten horned dragon, tracking the supposed activities of a New World Order secret elite and their Denver Airport construction plans and their ability to draw the attacks on the World Trade Center right into the back of a twenty dollar bill.  These were men … and they usually are men, not women (who have their own challenges and foibles in the Kingdom) … who have been given the gift of powerful minds, and who have been sidetracked by the temptations of modern Gnosticism.   The Kingdom is being robbed of how they could serve and love the Lord their God with all their mind.

The enemy has sidetracked them.  Their thoughts have been taken captive by the fears and delusions of the world.  They should, instead, be “casting down imaginations, and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God, and bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ”  (2 Corinthians 10:5).

To draw attention to false powers attributed to Satan becomes the Christian PCT's hobby, his drive, and his obsession.  The energy it demands can only take away from personal growth in the Lord, and from the sharing of the Gospel of Christ.

REASON SIX: PCTs are Satan’s Own Conspiracy

Yes, there is a conspiracy, and obviously I've been revealing it to you throughout this post: Satan is using his lies to poison some among us with his fabrications, tales of his power and vain imaginings of his might.  He is recruiting those attracted by such tales to make himself and his evil, not God and love and goodness, our focus as a body.

“The words of a talebearer,”  says Proverbs 18:8, “are as wounds, and they go down into the innermost parts of the belly.”  Many paranoid conspiracies are demonstrably false, no better than lies.  The rest are unsupported imaginings that can neither be proved nor falsified, because they exist only in the realm of paranoia.

And that’s exactly the kind of situation Satan relishes.  It puts us in fear of his tales and makes us forget the might of the One who bought us.

Isaiah said it best (8:12-13), so I’ll let his words be the last ones here this month:

“Do not call conspiracy

    everything this people calls a conspiracy;

do not fear what they fear,

    and do not dread it.

The LORD Almighty is the one you are to regard as holy,

    he is the one you are to fear,

    he is the one you are to dread.”

Marana Tha,

Cosmic Parx