Towards an Ethical
Reading of The Apocalypse:
Reflections on
John’s Use of Power, Violence, and Misogyny
David
L. Barr
Wright
State University
The Apocalypse of John, on the usual reading, tells
the story of Jesus’ return from Heaven--waging triumphant war over the powers
of evil and establishing God’s rule on earth.
And who cannot but long for such a triumph? Still, the morality of this
story can be, and has been, questioned on a number of fronts. D. H. Lawrence called it "a rather
repulsive work" not content till the whole world be destroyed, except that
lake of fire in which those who fail to get in line might suffer eternally.[1]
The American philosopher C. S. Pierce lamented about the Bible:
But little by little the bitterness increases until in
the last book of the New Testament, its poor distracted author represents that
all the time Christ was talking about having come to save the world, the secret
design was to catch the entire human race, with the exception of a paltry
144,000, and souse them all in brimstone lake, and as the smoke of their
torment went up for ever and ever, to turn and remark, 'There is no curse any
more.' Would it be an insensible smirk
or a fiendish grin that should accompany such and utterance? I wish I could believe St. John did not
write it...."[2]
And more recently the feminist writer Tina Pippin has lamented:
The irony of the grotesque burning of the Whore is
that the Christian utopia is itself an oppressive world (for women). .... But
in the Apocalypse narrative, gender oppression is left untouched by the sword
of God.[3]
She goes so far as to call it an "misogynist fantasy" and to
conclude: "The Apocalypse means death to women" (86).
What these and countless other readers share is their
revulsion to the images of violence and coercion in this story. We decry the Beast's vicious destruction of
the Whore (17:16); God's ultimate consignment of humanity to the Lake of Fire
(20:15); the Warrior’s defeat of the armies of the nations with its gory feast
where the birds of prey are invited to “gather for the great supper of God, to
eat the flesh of kings, the flesh of captains, the flesh of the mighty, the
flesh of horses and their riders--flesh of all, both free and slave, both small
and great." (19:17). The ultimate
value in this story seems to be power, power exercised ruthlessly. One even has the sense that God is willing
to engage in torture in an effort to induce humanity to repent. Notice how John describes the final
torments:
The fourth angel poured his bowl on the sun, and it
was allowed to scorch them with fire;
they were scorched by the fierce heat, but they cursed the name of God,
who had authority over these plagues, and they did not repent and give him
glory. The fifth angel poured his bowl
on the throne of the beast, and its kingdom was plunged into darkness; people
gnawed their tongues in agony, and
cursed the God of heaven because of their pains and sores, and they did not
repent of their deeds (16:9, 11; see also 9:21).
Suffering does not lead to repentance, so it seems inevitably to lead
to destruction. There can be no
question that this is a war story and that John uses the conventions of war,
with all their repulsive details. This
is disconcerting, but the moral problem goes deeper.
The traditional reading of the Apocalypse is morally
objectionable on two general grounds. First, if God triumphs over evil only
because God has more power than evil, then power--not love or goodness or
truth--is the ultimate value of the universe. Second, if God has the power to
quell evil and end suffering and plans one day to use that power, then by what
logic can God allow innocent suffering to continue? John seems to recognize
this second issue in the telling of the story, for just this question is raised
by the martyrs whose lives have been poured out on the altar:
"Sovereign Lord, holy and true, how long will it be before
you judge and avenge our blood on the inhabitants of the earth?" (6:10).
That such an issues is raised within the story suggests that the author
is not unaware of these moral concerns.
A narrative reading of John’s Apocalypse will allow us to see new ways
to address both the issue of coercion and domination by power and the issue of
God’s failure to act to end innocent suffering in the interim. While a narrative reading does not solve all
the moral problems of this work, it does give us a new perspective on them,
even raising other concerns. The paper
considers two moral issues raised by a narrative reading (the issue of immoral
means to moral ends and the issue of human passiveness in the face of divine
control).
Does God Overcome
Evil by Superior Power? (The Morality of Domination)
Narrative analysis discovers meaning in the
dialectical interaction between the words of the text and the scenarios of the
reader.[4]
Meaning is a cooperative venture of author and audience; different audiences
with different experiences and different concerns will discover different
meanings in a work of literature. That is what we expect. Now some have gotten
carried away with this observation on the role of the reader and declare all
readings valid. I reject this view, for the text constrains our readings.[5]
Let me illustrate this point by giving two quick readings of the scene in
Revelation 5.
In that scene
John is perplexed that no one can be found to open the sealed scroll; he is so
distressed he cries:
Then one of the elders said to me, "Do not weep.
See, the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David, has conquered, so that
he can open the scroll and its seven seals." Then I saw ... among the elders a Lamb standing as if it had been
slaughtered, having seven horns and seven eyes, which are the seven spirits of
God sent out into all the earth (5:5-6).
There could not be a more stark symbolic contrast between the figure
announced by the angel and the character actually seen by John: conquering
lion/slaughtered lamb. Now on one level this is a portrayal of early Christian
experience: they had heard that the messiah would come with justice and
vengeance, but what they actually saw in Jesus was quite the
contrary.
But we must not miss the narrative force of this
symbolic shift. There are three major characterizations of Jesus in the
Apocalypse: The majestic, human-like figure of chapters 1-3; the slaughtered-standing
Lamb of chapters 4-11; and the heavenly warrior of chapters 12-22. These fit their stories, for the story of
the last section is one of cosmic war; the story of the middle section is one
of worship in the heavenly sanctuary (where the lamb’s sacrificial significance
is clear); and the story of the first section is one of issuing imperial
decrees (the so-called seven letters). If these characterizations remained
constant the traditional reading might be defensible; but they do not. Once
introduced, the Lamb dominates the rest of the action. It is the Lamb who
gathers the 144,000 holy warriors on Mt Zion (14:1); it is the Lamb on whom the
armies of evil make war (17:14); it is even the Lamb who marries and rules
after the war (19:7: 22:3). My point is that this symbolic inversion is also a
narrative inversion and that the narrative inversion is also a moral inversion:
in this story evil only appears to be conquered by power. In this story, evil
is conquered by the death of the Lamb.
This is seen clearly in the miniature scene in chapter
12 where we are told the story of a war in heaven:
And war broke
out in heaven; Michael and his angels fought against the dragon. The dragon and
his angels fought back, but they were defeated, and there was no longer any
place for them in heaven (12:7-8).
This is the traditional language of holy war; but the language, story,
and moral situation are inverted by John’s coda to the story:
But they have conquered him by the blood of the Lamb
and by the word of their testimony, for they did not cling to life even in the
face of death (12:11).
It is poor reading to overlook this inversion and to read as if the
Lamb has not replaced the Lion in this story. Similar inversions occur at every
point in the story--even in the climactic scene in which the heaven Warrior
kills all his enemies, for his conquest is by means of a sword that comes from
his mouth, not by the power of his arm (19:21). Surely this story is built on the mythology of Holy War (and that
itself may be ethically problematic), but just as surely John consistently
demythologizes the war--or perhaps more accurately, remythologizes the warrior
with the image of the suffering savior so that the death of the warrior and not
some later battle is the crucial event.
At every juncture in this story where good triumphs over evil a close
examination will show that the victory is finally attributed to the death of
Jesus.[6]
When Does God Act? (The Morality of Justice)
This leads to a second and related point. The actions of the Apocalypse are never
arbitrary, never do they rest on simple power.
There is a logic of judgment finally articulated by the angel of the
waters when the third bowl causes the earth’s water to turn to blood:
because they shed the blood of saints and prophets,
you have given them blood to drink. It is what they deserve!" (16:6).
Notice both the appropriateness/justice of the retribution (blood
because of blood) and also the inevitability of the retribution. This same
logic undergirds our own ecological consciousness. If our waters are polluted it is not because God is exercising
some tyrannical power over us; it is because we foul our own streams. This is the same logic of justice that
undergirded Amos' visions of Israel's destruction because of social
injustice. Amos first saw a vision of
locusts, but when he prayed God stopped the locusts. Amos then saw a vision of fire, but when he prayed God stopped
the fire. Amos then saw a vision of a
crooked wall, and Amos could not pray for relief. For crooked walls--and unjust societies--fall. (See Amos 7:1-9).
So in our story the martyrs have to wait till their
"number would be complete" (6:11).
This is not because God awaits in some dispassionate indifference to the
suffering of the innocent, but because in John’s story God acts through
the process of suffering. There comes a
time in every oppression when the amount of coercion needed to maintain a
system will itself destroy the system, as we ourselves have seen in Russia and
South Africa. So the great Whore has
become drunk with the blood of the saints (17:6); Rome's very act of killing
becomes her own death. Such is John's
vision.
My first argument, then, is that a narrative reading
of the Apocalypse puts quite a different construction on the story and, in
fact, contradicts the traditional reading. A narrative reading shows that in
this story evil is overcome by suffering love not by superior power and that
the apparent delay in judgment of the wicked is not due to divine indifference
but to John’s basic understanding that human acts cause human downfall. This
does not, of course, solve all the moral problems of the Apocalypse.
I will now consider issues raised by two recent
interpreters of the Apocalypse, both well-acquainted with narrative readings:
Tina Pippin and Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza.
Both are concerned with the political significance of reading
Revelation, though in different ways.
Pippin raises especially the issue of the morality of the means to a new
world; Schüssler Fiorenza raises especially the issue of the morality of
reading Revelation as a religious tract and ignoring its social consequence.
How Should We Read John’s Images? (The Morality of Violent Means)
Surely many of us, myself included, are not
comfortable with John's violent images, with the easy equation of blood and
wine, with the intolerable depiction of a lake of fire. But ancient sensibilities are not the same
as modern; and war stories are not polite reading. This story is profoundly disturbing; the question is does the use
of such conventions and imagery result in an immoral story?
I will focus this question by looking at the specific
challenge leveled by Tina Pippin in the work referred to above.[7]
First let me note the broad agreements between Pippin and me: we both engage in
narrative readings; we are both feminists; we both are deeply disturbed by the
rhetorical violence of the story. Within these broad agreements we disagree
almost completely on the moral implications of this story. I cannot hope to do
justice to her whole critique, so let me concentrate on her analysis of the
destruction of the Whore of Babylon (told in Rev 17 and interpreted in 18 &
19). After a dramatic scene of the woman clothed in scarlet riding on a great
beast and accompanied by ten kings, John is told:
they and the
beast will hate the whore; they will make her desolate and naked; they will
devour her flesh and burn her up with fire (17:16).
Pippin interprets this scene thus:
The object of desire is made the object of death. The
Whore/Goddess/Queen/ Babylon is murdered (a sexual murder) and eaten and
burned. This grotesquely exaggerated vision of death and desire accentuates the
hatred of the imperial power--and of women. This story of death and desire is
the most vividly misogynist passage in the New Testament. The Apocalypse is
cathartic on many levels, but in terms of an ideology of gender, both women
characters in the narrative and women readers are victimized.[8]
I see three issues here. First, there is the issue of
contemporary reading and what such a story does to its readers. Second, there
is the issue of how one should read the gender inscriptions of such a text. And
third, there is the broader issue of how one should interpret the violence of
this text. These are all three issues
of interpretation--that is they become moral issues when we offer
interpretations of the text. The
third--the images of violence--is also a textual issues, that is, a moral issue
whatever interpretation we might offer.
As to contemporary readers, Pippin is absolutely right
to confront the way women are portrayed in this text. Contemporary men can justify their mistreatment of women by such
ancient texts; contemporary women draw self-images from such stories. No one can be allowed to feel that what
happens to John's whore in this story could ever be justified for any
woman. It is dangerous that John used a
human image here. We must challenge the
text at this point (as we must challenge its comfort with violence generally).
The question is how to challenge it, which I will return to in my third point
below.
Second, I strongly disagree with the way Pippin reads
the gender inscriptions of the text. I believe she makes three errors: she
literalizes the images rather than grappling with their ambiguity; she
minimizes the role of the feminine in the story; and she misconstrues the
relationship between the violence and the final resolution.
Pippin quotes Tilde Sankovitch's claim that it is the
focus on sex (rather than intellect, imagination, or feeling) that makes women
subservient to men (84), but I wonder if Pippin is not doing something
similar. There seems far more sex in
her book than in John's. I would guess that
a bride in John's world had far more social and economic significance than sexual,
but we hear nothing of these. Instead we hear of the 144,000 entering the New
Jerusalem as an image of "mass intercourse" (80). It's a city. Entering a city is not the same thing as having intercourse, at
least for me. Only absolutizing the gender inscription of the city-as-woman
allows one to misconstrue the text so completely.[9]
Pippin’s reading strategy causes her to absolutize the
gender inscriptions of the text rather than to challenge them or to explore
their ambiguity.[10] The
Whore may be imaged as a woman, but in the story it is also a city--and not
just any city. The Whore is the Great City that rules over the cities of the
world. Admitting this ambiguity changes the moral equation that comes from the
Whore’s destruction.
So, too, the moral equation shifts when we recognize
the positive valuation that the story gives to women. I agree with Pippin that "the female in this story does not
get enough credit" (76), but I see this is as much the reader’s fault as
the author’s. Most readers--Pippin included--virtually ignore the positive
characterizations of women and never seem to notice that in each instance the
evil woman is paired with an evil man: Jezebel/Balaam; Whore/Beast. In fact masculine evil characters
predominate and positive portrayals of women are important. Both the women in chapter twelve, the Queen
of Heaven and Gaia, act independently, both prevail over the Dragon's attack,
neither is weak or subservient. It is
woman supported by woman, as Gaia opens her mouth and swallows the river from
the serpent (12:16). It may not be as
satisfying as if she had cut off the serpent's head, but it is not a negligible
victory.
Still Pippin claims:
The Apocalypse falls short of complete subversion of
the social order. The female is still absent,
even though she is represented in both powerful and powerless modes of being
and acting. The female is still other,
still marginalized, and still banished to the edge of the text. (72)
But surely the New Jerusalem is a central image--probably one of only
three images that most people remember from the story (I'd guess the four
horsemen and 666 are the other two.).
Far more attention is given to describing the bride and her significance
than is given to the groom. In fact, I
find it striking that this community that can image itself as a convent of
celibate, virgin males (14:4) can also image itself as a bride. In this story the male becomes the female,
hardly a marginal image.
So I argue that John’s story is not so misogynistic as
Pippin suggests, that her deliberate reading “as a woman” (53) too easily
reifies negative feminine imagery and too easily overlooks positive feminine
imagery. But this is not the heart of the problem; the crucial problem is the
violence with which women and men are treated in this story. How should we
understand the violence portrayed in this story?
Two issues need to be considered separately here:
John’s use of violent images and the structural role of violence in the story.
I have already argued that this story regularly inverts the images of violence,
so that what at first appears to coercive power (Jesus slays all his enemies)
turns out on closer examination to be something else (he slays them with the
sword of his mouth). Those who see nothing but contradictions between John’s
story and the Gospel story of Jesus engage in too literal a reading of these
images.
This does not, in my mind, justify them. I find them
repulsive and morally inadequate; but I suspect that is because I read from the
perspective of an educated Western person in a secure social and economic
situation. John and his situation were quite different. While I do not wish to
excuse John by saying he was a man of his time, nor do I wish to judge him by
the standards of our time. It seems to me that these images of violence remain
morally problematic whatever interpretation we might offer for them. Still, careful reading is called for.
Thus in the scene of the destruction of the Whore of
Babylon that Pippin highlights, it is human brutality that is portrayed. The
Ten Kings and the Beast destroy her. Even so, this is because “God has put it
into their hearts to carry out God’s purpose” (17:17). Thus in some way God
must be held accountable for all the violence in the world, even human
violence, for God is responsible for creation. But this is surely morally
different than imagining divine violence. In fact, John signals this
dialectical tension by immediately adding, “The woman you saw is the great city
that rules over the kings of the earth” (17:18). Those who seek to dominate
others will themselves by devoured by the process; it is, John says, what God
has ordained. While the image of violence is problematic for me, the
understanding of violence is not.
This leads to a second consideration, to what degree
does this story portray violence as the means to renew the earth? Pippin sees war and disasters as the means
whereby the reign of God comes (96-103).
I see the reverse: wars and calamities are human endeavors to avoid
God's new world. In the vision of the Seven Seals, for example, John is clear
on the cause of war, famine, and death (seals two, three and four); it is the
human conqueror of the first seal (6:1-8).
These are not the means to heavenly city but obstacles on the way. Seal
five then shows the innocent lives under the altar crying out for justice but
being comforted and told to wait “until the number would be complete.” Then
follows seal six, complete with all the traditional apocalyptic signs (black
sun, bloody moon, falling stars, etc), and the terrible cry to the rocks and
mountains:
"Fall on
us and hide us from the face of the one seated on the throne and from the wrath
of the Lamb; for the great day of their
wrath has come, and who is able to stand?" (6:16-17).
It is easy to imagine divine violence here, but it is important to see
that none is portrayed. Instead we have a vision of the preservation of those
who receive the mark of God. Renewal comes after violence but not through
violence.
Were violence a means to renewal, the story would
advocate such violence, but such is not the case. Even Pippin recognizes that
this story advocates non-violent resistance (99) and sees the danger of a
literal interpretation of the details of violence (100). She just does not give these factors any weight
in her interpretation. For me they are
crucial.
Pippin and I both want to challenge the violence of
this text. She does this by taking the violence at face value and condemning
it. I choose another strategy, for I read the text as a story that transforms
the traditional images of sacred violence into images of suffering,
faithfulness, and consistent resistance to evil. Still I regret the violence and wish the story were not so easy
to read as accepting of violence.
I do not deny that the Apocalypse can be read as a
misogynist fantasy; Pippin has done such a reading. But I do not find it
convincing, any more than I find the traditional reading that sees the story as
one of conquest by power and coercion. Both readings fail to give adequate
weight to the narrative strategy by which John utilizes and transforms the
ancient story of Holy War by means of his community’s experience of Jesus. Only
when we read the story in the light of this transformation can we deem the
story moral.
But it is precisely this reading of the story as the
story of Jesus that raises one further moral point. Does the Apocalypse stand against real world oppression in the
everyday lives of its audience or should we read it theologically. In other words, is God’s rule in the Apocalypse
a spiritual rule?
Is God in Control? (The Moral Danger of
Spirituality)
Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza has done much to call the
guild of biblical scholarship to ethical accountability.[11] My own effort to address these issues grows
out of her challenge. But it was only
in an exchange with her at the 1996 Annual Meeting that I finally grasped one
of her major concerns with my interpretation of the Apocalypse. A little background.
My own narrative reading of the Apocalypse focuses on
its fictional setting within a worship service. I see the ending as an invitation to the Eucharist, wherein Jesus
truly does come to the gathered community.
In fact, I argue that all the events of the apocalyptic narrative have
already occurred in the death and resurrection of Jesus. When John has the loud voices in heaven
declare:
The kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our
Lord and of his Messiah, and he will reign forever and ever. (11:15)
I take both the saying and its tenses seriously. The transformation of the cosmos has already
occurred.
But of course it has not occurred. Rome still dominates the world and the lives
of John’s followers. It is just here
that my argument takes a dangerous ethical turn, as I now understand, for I
argue that the overthrow of evil occurs within the liturgical setting. The consistent theme of Revelation is
“worship God” (19:10; 22:8-9; see 4:10; 5:14; 7:11, 15; 11:16; 14:7; 15:4;
19:4; 20:4 and contrast 9:20; 13:4,8, 14-15; 14:9; 16:2; 19:20). Those who worship God do by that very act
enact the reign of God, thus to worship God is to experience God’s kingdom, as
I argued long ago.[12] All the action of Revelation occurs whenever
God’s people gather in God’s service.
This interpretation entails two ethical dangers: the danger of viewing
John’s story as a spiritual story unconnected to the actual lives of oppressed
people and the danger of viewing the world as already transformed and therefore
trustworthy.
What I saw for the first time last year was that the
narrative reading of Revelation that I propose could easily be understood as a
spiritual reading, that is, as a reading that locates both the problem and the
solution in the theological rather than the sociological sphere. Now this is
quite shocking and, it seems to me, a serious misreading of both John’s story
and my interpretation. To argue, as I
do, that “In the present worship of the church, God’s reign is already realized
here and now on earth”[13]
need not mean that God’s reign is only spiritual. And it is the “only” that is the problem.[14]
Perhaps the danger of this view can be seen most
clearly in the Pauline tradition of Ephesians, when the writer declares:
For our struggle is not against enemies of blood and
flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic
powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the
heavenly places. (6:12)
The danger here is not the last part of the declaration but the
first. The denial of a “blood and
flesh” embodiment of evil is nearly the opposite of what John’s story portrays,
for in John’s story the cosmic powers are vividly embodied in the blood and
flesh of the Roman empire. John’s story
stands firmly against real economic and social oppression not just against some
theological idea of idolatry, as the dirge of chapter 18 makes plain. The dirge shows the lament of the political
and economic leaders, including their inventory of the cargo of the ships of
the great city:
gold and silver and precious stones and pearls and
fine linen and purple cloth and silk and scarlet and all kinds of scented wood
and all sorts of ivory vessels and all sorts of expensive wooden vessels and
copper and iron and marble and cinnamon and spice and incense and myrrh and
frankincense and wine and olive oil and fine flour and wheat and cattle and
sheep and horses and chariots and bodies and lives of humans 18:12-13
These are the luxury items of the ruling elite, trafficking in human
life. John sees the hand of the dragon
in the ordinary commerce of his day and his call to worship God is a call to
resist such commerce (see 13:16-18).
This leads to a second, related point.
How can John affirm both that the Roman empire and Roman culture are
corrupt and demonic and that “The kingdom of the world has become the kingdom
of our Lord...?” Is the world redeemed
or not or does redemption come only in the church?
It is a false choice.
For the submission to the divine will evident in the service of worship
brings the characters of this story into direct opposition to the dominating
powers of class and culture and their stand against such domination is
understood to entail even their lives (12:11).
Rather than understanding the church in our modern sense as a separate
social institution, we must explore the ancient situation wherein religion was
embedded in politics and the family.
Here Walter Wink’s distinction between the outer and inner form of the
Powers is useful.
Wink has done more than any other scholar to articulate a
sophisticated and compelling modern understanding of the ancient view of the
“principalities and powers of this age” that were an essential part of the
ancient--and especially the apocalyptic--worldview.[15] Rather than speak in a dualistic fashion of
spiritual forces and human institutions, Wink speaks of the inner and outer
reality of all powers. To use a
completely modern example, we must say that the power of international business
today is both a concrete physical thing (with buildings, employees, and fax
machines) and a spiritual presence (a corporate culture, a way of doing
business). So too was the Roman empire.
Understood this way, it makes no sense to ask whether
the reign of God imagined in the Apocalypse is spiritual or social; the answer
must be both. How then are we to understand
John’s bold declaration that the kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of
God?
First it is John’s clear conviction that the
slaughtered-standing lamb has power over the powers; he alone can open the
scroll (5:2-6). While the imagined
mechanism for this power is debated, Jesus’ death seems to represent for John
the defeat of Satan (12:11).
Second it is clear that John thinks that all who join
their testimony to that of Jesus, even to the point of dying like him, share in
that power (12:11; 6:10; 17:6).
Further, each of the letters to the seven churches contains a promise
for those who conquer, so such conquest is both possible and necessary. And there is the paradox. Victory is won. Victory remains to be won.
A similar paradox exists in Paul’s thought. In a convoluted argument about the nature
and reality of the resurrection, Paul embraces two contradictory points: Christ
reigns; the powers still reign:
But in fact
Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have died.
For since death came through a human being, the resurrection of the dead has
also come through a human being; for as all die in Adam, so all will be made
alive in Christ. But each in his own order: Christ the first fruits, then at
his coming those who belong to Christ. Then comes the end, when he hands over
the kingdom to God the Father, after he has destroyed every ruler and every
authority and power. For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under
his feet. The last enemy to be destroyed is death. 1 Cor 15:20-26
Christ is reigning, according to Paul, and will do so until all enemies
are defeated (thus they are still in power).
The reign of Christ must eventually destroy all the powers. Those who swear allegiance to Jesus’ kingdom
stand opposed to the rule of those powers.
In John’s Apocalypse, those powers are incarnate as
the beast of Roman rule (13:1-18) and a central part of John’s purpose in
writing is to persuade the audience to resist those powers. To worship God alone. To imagine that God alone will one day end
injustice in the world is to ignore our own duty to change the world we live
in.
No doubt the Apocalypse of John is an ethically
problematic text. Many thoughtful
people have found it wanting. The
traditional interpretation merely substitutes domination by God for the
domination of Rome; and not content merely to propound another totalitarianism
it adds divine indifference and delay.
A narrative reading shows how ill-founded such an interpretation is, but
a narrative reading reveals other moral issues: the issue of violence (and
especially violence against women) and the issue of spiritualizing the text,
cutting it off from its situation of social oppression. I have shown that these are not necessary
failings of a narrative reading. In
fact, a narrative reading informed by social understanding reveals John’s text
to be a call for resistance against the powers of domination in the specific
social and economic circumstances of Roman Asia Minor.
Perhaps we can see this situation more clearly if we
return to one of John’s opening sentences by which he introduces himself to the
audience. In explaining his presence on
Patmos he uses two family metaphors to relate to the audience:
o adelfoj umwn kai suykoinwnoj
As brother and partner, John claims the strongest possible relationship
with the audience, but the surprising turn comes next when he gives the terms
of the partnership:
en th qliyei kai basileia kai upomonh en Ihsou
qliyij belongs
to the language domain of trouble and suffering; Louw and Nida suggest “that
which causes pain” (22.2).[16] It is regularly used to refer to the period
of tribulation imagined to come at the end of the age (e.g., Matt 24:21). basileia, by
contrast, belongs to the domain of power and rule--nearly the antithesis of qliyij. Then to this
oxymoronic pair, John adds a third. upomonh is usually
translated endurance; Louw and Nida suggest the ability to bear up under
difficult circumstances. It is, for
John I think, a more active quality of standing up to evil; it is one of the works
of the faithful (2:19).
Now the pairing of upomonh and qliyij makes perfectly good sense, but what of basileia? Only an
apocalypse can show life as simultaneously qliyij and basileia, for an apocalypse allows the audience to look behind
the veil of ordinary experience (an unredeemed world) and see the true order of
life (God’s rule). John’s audience is
imagined to live in two worlds, corresponding to the basic dualism of John’s
world. But this is not a dualism of spirit
and flesh or even of secular and spiritual, for the way to live in both is upomonh . Or
perhaps it is more accurate to say that life in the basileia provides power to live the resistance to evil (upomonh) that is necessary in the time of qliyij. (See 2:2-3; 3:10; 13:10; 14:12.) Let me try to clarify this further by
considering the implied audience of this work, or more specifically, the
naratee.
I see John’s story moving at three basic narrative
levels, each with its own narrator and naratee. The three levels of narration are the telling of the whole work
by a public reader (1:3); the telling of the stories by John on Patmos (1:9);
and the telling of things by characters in these stories (for example, the
voice addresses the souls under the altar in 6:11). To whom does the narrator speak at each level; who are the
narratees?
At the outermost level the narrator is the reader and
the narratee is the audience gathered to hear the reading (1:3). This narratee corresponds most closely to
the implied audience of the work, but we know almost nothing about it. The story leaves this narratee largely
undefined.
The second-level narratee, however, is carefully
defined, for that is the listener to whom John narrates his vision of the risen
Christ. This narratee is explicitly
named as the seven churches and extensively characterized in the messages to
the churches (chapters 2-3). This
narratee is a complex group, both rich and poor, both zealous and lax, both loving
and cold. They are carefully distinguished
from the people John calls Jezebel and Balaam, precisely because they are folk
who might be tempted to follow such accommodating leaders.[17]
At the third narrative level, the narratees are the
people addressed in the stories told to these second-level narratees--that is,
the saints and martyrs who struggle to conquer the beast (see 6:10, 15:2, and
the constant references to saints and servants). They are characterized as
suffering and oppressed. These saints
and martyrs are the focal points of the story and both the second and first
level narratees are encouraged to identify with them, leading one narrative
critic to assert that ideal audience takes on the role of the martyr.[18] This is something of a
poetical exaggeration, but it is clear that by telling the story through the
point of view of those abused by Roman power, the discourse persuades the
audience to resist such power.
The purpose of the Apocalypse is to remind these
people of the vile things Rome has done and is doing. It was Roman power, after all, that crucified Jesus; it is Roman
power that constitutes the totalitarian state in which they now live. If, as the saying goes, politics makes
strange bedfellows, John wanted his audience to know just whom they were
getting in bed with. John's apocalypse
is a revelation of the true nature of Roman power and Roman culture. Seeing Rome in this light could lead to
despair, but it is a measure of John's achievement that he has created a story
that both reveals the mistake of accommodating to Rome and provides a rationale
for resistance. For the prayers, the patience, the persistent resistance of the
saints overthrow the powers of evil and bring God's kingdom into reality.
Let me conclude with a personal anecdote. I grew up with and internalized the popular
reading of the Apocalypse. But of
course I did not regard this as “a reading” but simply as the what the Book of
Revelation taught. As I eventually
found that understanding of life untenable, I simply stopped paying any
attention to this book--a time-honored strategy. But in the early years of my teaching students would pester me to
teach it. I taught special courses on
just about everything else in the New Testament, but ignored Revelation. Finally, after several years of teaching, I
relented. Much to my surprise, when I
applied the historical, social, and (especially) literary methods that worked
so well with the gospels to the Book of Revelation, an exciting and
sophisticated story emerged. The book
had been transformed because the way I approached it had been transformed.
A narrative reading, intersecting with a social
reading, turns the popular American understanding of the Apocalypse on its
head. For in the popular imagination,
God conquers by power and the violence of holy war is justified because it
leads to a good end. In popular thought
the end comes only as the work of God and in God’s own time. I have tried to show that each of these
ethically tenuous positions can be rejected on the basis of a narrative and
social reading of John’s story. John’s
story stands firmly against violence and domination and calls the audience to
active resistance to the powers of Rome.
[2]Charles
S. Peirce, "Evolutionary Love," The Essential Peirce: selected
Philosophical Writings. Vol 1 (1867-1893), Nathan Houser and Christian
Kloesel, eds. Indiana University Press, 1992: 365-66.
[3]Tina
Pippin, Death and Desire: The Rhetoric of Gender in the Apocalypse of John.
(Louisville: Westminster/John Knox, 1992:105).
[4]For
a beginning introduction, see Mark Allan Powell, What is Narrative Criticism? (Fortress Press, 1991). For a
more advanced analysis and demonstration of the interaction between narrative
and other criticisms see, Janice Capel Anderson and Stephen D. Moore, Mark
and Method: New Approaches to Biblical Studies (Minneapolis: Fortress
Press, 1992). For an application see David M. Rhoads and Donald Michie, Mark
as Story: An Introduction to the Narrative of a Gospel (Fortress Press,
1982).
[5]For
a careful articulation of this viewpoint see Wolfgang Iser, The Implied Reader: Patterns of
Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1974) and especially The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978).
[6]For
a consistent reading of Revelation as narrative see my forthcoming EndStory:
A Narrative Commentary on John’s Apocalypse (Polebridge Press).
[9]The
whore is certainly a sexual figure and her fornication is highlighted, but
John's amazement--judging from the angel's response to it--relates to her power
and wealth not her sexuality. But we
hear little of these. Nor do I see any
evidence that thaumadzo has erotic connotations. It means to marvel or wonder and it is an
aorist indicating that it was an initial reaction not a present longing. This is only one example of where I find
Pippin forcing the text into a unified interpretation in spite of her desire
not to do so (88).
[10]See
the work of Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, Revelation: Vision of a Just World
(Fortress, 1991, esp. 12-15) , and the theoretical basis in “The Will to Choose
or to Reject: Continuing our Critical Work,” Feminist Interpretation of the
Bible, L. M. Russell, ed. (Westminster, 1985, 125-36).
[11]See
her SBL Presidential Address, published as "The Ethics of Interpretation:
De‑centering Biblical Scholarship," Journal of Biblical
Literature 107 1988:3‑17. But
one finds these concerns address throughout her extensive writings on the
Apocalypse.
[12]David
L. Barr, "The Apocalypse as a Symbolic Transformation of the World: A
Literary Analysis," Interpretation 38 1984:47.
[13]Elisabeth
Schüssler Fiorenza, Revelation:
Vision of a Just World (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1991:126).
[14]I
owe a good bit also to Neil Elliott, whose book, Liberating Paul: The
Justice of God and the Politics of the Apostle (Maryknoll: Orbis Books,
1993), helped me think through some of these issues.
[15]Walter
Wink, Naming the Powers: The
Language of Power in the New Testament (Philadelphia: Fortress Press,
1984). Unmasking the Powers: The
Invisible Forces That Determine Human Existence (Minneapolis: Fortress
Press, 1986). Engaging the Powers:
Discernment and Resistance in a world of Domination (Minneapolis: Fortress
Press, 1992).
[16]Johannes
P. Louw and Eugene A. Nida, editors, Greek‑English Lexicon of the New
Testament based on Semantic Domains (New York: United Bible Societies
1989).
[17]I
do not regard Jezebel and Balaam as part of the intended naratee because John’s
characterization of them is through insult and name-calling, devices designed
to make them appear as outsiders. See
Adela Yarbro Collins, "Vilification and Self‑Definition in the Book
of Revelation," HTR 79 1986:308‑20.