The older way to read the Bible is to take the text apart and show the various sources from which it was compiled. The Anchor Bible of the Seventies represented a kind of final step in what was known as the Higher Criticism. The editor of its edition of “The Book of Revelations” suggests that the material in the book comes largely from Jewish apocalypses although some other material is added on. That tells you that what separates “Revelations” from the rest of the New Testament is its ties to “Ezekiel”. It is not tied to the non-apocalyptic tone which pervades most of the Gospels, at least if you conceive Jesus and his followers, a few remarks to the contrary, to be in for the long haul of reconstructing mankind, which is what salvation is really about.
The newer way to read the Bible is to put the text together again by seeing it as a literary construction made up of a variety of materials whose final text, the one we have inherited for two thousand years or so, has a coherent meaning. The meanings in the New Testament are typological or allegorical. “Revelations”, by this light, can be interpreted, as it is, for one, by Bruce J. Malina in his still very useful 1983 book “The New Testament World: Insights from Cultural Anthropology”, as using the visions of sky gods that are available to the Mediterranean world at the time of its composition as the basis for conceiving what a city of god would be like. What separates “Revelations” from the rest of the New Testament, in this case, is its adoption of astrological imagery.
Neither of those approaches, however, deals with other textures that separate “Revelations” from the rest of both the Old and the New Testament. The predictions in “Revelations” are made according to archetypes, which makes these predictions inevitable or determined while the predictions of the Old Testament prophets simply tell what lies in the future for Israel or mankind if they do not change their ways. The earlier predictions, those made in the so-called Deuteronomistic History, are more magical, in that the enactment of liturgical events brings about real changes in history, as when, in “Joshua”, collecting stones to set within the Jordan River is both a reenactment of the parting of the Red Sea and also sanctifies and will result in success in the quest to enter and conquer the Holy Land. That is different from the liturgy in “Revelations”, which is the whole of the book enacts what happens to the universe rather than is a reenactment or the cause of some particular happening.
The sense of predetermination that is found in “Revelations” is also very different from the way the life of Jesus is predetermined. God may know what Judas will do, and Jesus may know that Peter will deny him, but the reader is still allowed to contemplate that either of them could have acted differently. In that sense, the Gospels are a more traditional narrative, akin to any literature that allows us to wish, while watching the play, that Oedipus or Hamlet might act a bit differently, Hamlet perhaps not so losing his temper that he kills Polonius, which makes him a danger to the court because he is mad, though, strictly speaking, he is also an assassin whom Claudius, for some reason, cannot put down.
“Revelations” also introduces the idea to the New Testament that at the end of time, those marked for punishment are punished and those destined for glory are anointed as such. This, of course, is what so many of its readers across the ages have taken to be the main message of Christianity. Those ideas and images of subordination that supply the texture of life after the world has ended are adopted by the author of “Revelations” from the Roman Empire that he otherwise excoriates. Otherwise, why is there this need for a settling up where everyone gets their due? Nothing in the rest of the New Testament requires it. Jesus is concerned with salvation, not damnation.
“Revelations”, moreover, is also a proto-Gnostic document because it sees the war of good against evil as carried out by the supernal powers, humanity wafted about by forces larger than itself, like civilians in a war, and like them, each person required to take sides whether they want to or not. For this and for the other reasons cited, “Revelations” hangs heavy over the Western imagination because it largely robs people of the ability to alter their own lives or the lives of the world and leads people to read events in history as mere actualizations of predetermined events, every reader full of foreboding of the doom that is to come.
There is another way to read “Revelations”, which is that it is deterministic only in the way a liturgy is deterministic. The book lays out the steps in a ceremony that portrays in all its majesty the transformation of the world from what it is to the time when God is fully present in the world. It is a ceremony for the installation of the King of Kings, the Emperor of Emperors. Like other liturgies, it is a progress of stately and anticipated and aesthetically balanced and meaningful steps towards the central act of transformation, whether that is of the bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ, or of a congregation from a group of people in a room into a community that is experiencing and will experience itself as having experienced the presence of God in their midst. Understood this way, the burden of determinism and the harshness of punitive justice is lifted, replaced by a sense of awe and majesty, as one sees that which will be, though it must be said that this is not the view of “Revelations” that has been paramount for a very long time now, a more dour reading also encouraged by the tone of the text, however much the liturgical meaning is the only one that provides a structure that makes sense of the text if one is not given over to scavenging for what one or another symbol might represent in the course of world history.
The book begins with something other than the opening note of the liturgy itself. There is a series of letters to separated churches that are only Pauline in form even if that form might serve to confirm the authenticity of this late document for a contemporaneous audience. The imagery of the letters is that of a writer a generation or two removed from the founders of the church and so more concerned with making vivid its experience rather than merely calling people away from sinfulness. He wishes to instill religiosity rather than to channel it. The author is also removed from Paul and the Pauline letters by his anger, as if the community has suffered already too much and so revenge will soon be on its way. The author counts out the nature of this revenge with a clever stratagem: he will not relate how heaven will be, but what the events will be here on Earth that is the prelude to heaven. In that way, people will see enough that is familiar enough to them as extraordinary events on earth so that they will have a sense of just how extraordinary will be what will eventually happen. The author adds an additional narrative layer so that the reader knows that the story is told from a distance. It is a report of a vision allowed to the author. He is ordered to copy this vision down, and even when to censor his rendition. That makes the author into an authorized traveler who may not get everything right, but has been there. Ulysses was unescorted into the underworld. John, ever so often reminded of his role by one or another angel who takes part in the future events, is a model for Dante, who is accompanied by Vergil, and for Primo Levi, who is, so to speak, accompanied by Dante.
The vision of the future begins with a set of disasters that unfold a creation story as well as a story of destruction. “Genesis” had presented a set of six days that represented the sequence of differentiations that are necessary to create the world as it is familiarly known, and so provide God with the satisfaction that allows him to rest and the reader with the satisfaction of knowing what had to be done so that things could be as they are, not that different from the physicist who calculates the asymmetries in the primordial soup that allowed matter as we know it, and so all the stars and planets, including our dear old Earth, to come into existence. The darkness of non-existence is first separated from the light of existence, and only later is the darkness of night separated from the light of day. The animals come late, after the rivers.
In “Revelations”, John of Patmos, its putative author, creates his own chronology of the ages of mankind. He follows a long tradition that goes back to what for him is the not too distant past of Ovid’s “Metamorphoses”. So his influences may not be only the apocalyptic writings of the period of the apocrypha. They may account for his imagery and his anger, but the sequence of stages is more reminiscent of Lucretius in that it is a contemplation of how society, the place of ordinary life, is constructed in stages, each new one presuming the accumulation of the previous ones, and so presumably temporally following after those more inclusive stages.
The seven seals show the order of these stages from the beginning of the social world to the present time to the future. The first seal reveals a rider on a horse who brings violence to the world. The second seal controls unbridled anarchy with the creation of the state. The rider can take away peace, which means only he has the ability to do so. This is the monopolization of violence that characterizes all states. The third rider brings an active economy. People husband the olive and the wine and trade wages for agricultural goods packaged in units. Then the seals become more ambitious, beyond what the state can currently control, and so a prediction of what the state might accomplish. The fourth seal extends the control by the state over death not only to violence, but also to famine, disease and wild beasts. Those are the presumptively unsocial parts of nature that can be brought under human control. The fifth seal shows those punished for their faith. They also should be brought under the protection of the state, rather than regarded as a natural result of the ability of power to override belief, of religion to be overtaken by politics. The sixth seal refers to natural disasters, something only an overreaching state might control.
This, of course, is not the natural history of society to which we currently subscribe. Sociologists think of religion as having elaborated itself as a distinct social institution before the state did so, but the author is reflecting on the relation of religion to the Roman Empire. The Roman Empire clearly has precedence. But sociologists do think of trade as having been made possible in the ancient Middle East by the creation of the city as an administrative center that controlled religion and justice and trade. Malina is therefore reading his social science correctly when he says that “Revelations” is a picture of the Mediterranean city.
The six seals or stages can be interpreted in the other direction as the decline rather than the rise of the state, and so all of the stages are in the future. The first thing that will happen is the loosing of random violence, then will come state terror, then will come wage slavery, then will come Malthusian depopulation, then will come the persecution of scapegoats, then will come natural disasters that destroy the state entirely, sending people into caves. (This is imagined long before the idea became common that our ancestors were cave people. Perhaps the image was of early desert monks living in caves outside of the cities of Egypt.)
The double movement towards the elaboration and deterioration of social organization as a result of man made and natural disasters makes sense as a reflection on the story of Babel, where those who reach high because of their superior social organization in fact reduce humanity to a lower stage of social organization. The ability to build the tower depends on coordination rather than on any special or new science, and the attempt is followed by a punishment which makes the conditions of cooperation ever more difficult, almost impossible because the lack of a common language is so fundamental. It affects the way we think about ourselves and not just the practical issues that could be compromised away. “Revelations” adds to Babel the ancient notion of the ages of humanity and the biblical notion that the creation of a new age is a dispensation from God, noted here in seals broken, the image of the seal taken from a message sent from one political official to another, presumably lesser one, about what is to be done. Again following from Malina, it can be said that the heavenly city brought to Earth in “Revelations” is an attempt to undue Babel by allowing all people to understand rather than merely audit the words of God.
The seventh seal is also the seventh day of creation, and so, in a reference to the fact that God rested on the seventh day. The drama is heightened by the author of “Revelations”, as if that were either possible or necessary. John notes that there was silence in heaven for about half an hour. This is an exquisite image. It is very precise. It conveys that a half hour is much less than the full day God made into the Sabbath. It also conveys the idea that something majestic is to follow, and that the half hour is the dramatic pause before that which is time enough only for people to think about what awaits them. For its part, the creation story is followed by something very peculiar: the center stage taken over by the humans God created who were supposed to merely inhabit Eden in perpetuity as another of God’s creatures who had their proper place rather than a special place as a constant irritation to God. Instead, the image in “Revelations” just conveys its own existential essence: the sense of how long a half hour can be when it is in anticipation of something momentous.
What could come after the holy week other than a repetition of the same? That would make the rest of “Revelations” anti-climactic. John, however, does not disappoint. The quiet is what occurs in any congregation just before a liturgy is to begin. Revelations 8:2 is the beginning of a liturgy that uses the full panoply of devices available in the construction of liturgy, then and now. First, there is incense, and then the imagination is allowed to be filled with a liturgical event that could not be done in the ordinary world. The censor is filled with fire from the altar and thrown on the Earth creating thunder, lightning and an earthquake. Most churches can’t arrange such grand special effects.
Then come the trumpets, each blast accompanied by an image that cannot be duplicated in a church service. Each successive trumpet blast creates a greater disaster, and by the sixth trumpet, supplementary angels are released with martial imagery to carry the activities of the liturgy beyond the church into the world at large, mankind divided into those who repent and those who do not, just as might happen in a church, yet here the fates of the two groups are treated as coterminous with the judgment made of them because of actions that people can take within the course of and as a climax to a liturgy: whether to renounce evil practices and the worship of idols or not.
The liturgy continues, the author building its drama not only by the greater magnitude of each successive event, but also by using his role as narrator, as if he were the favored reporter at a summit conference or a battle who nevertheless has to keep some things secret for a while. A voice tells him not to record what is said in the next liturgical event, which is the meaning that comes from the seven thunders. This is esoteric knowledge, therefore only to be known to those who attend the church service and so members of the sacred community. That information will be withheld from the outside reader suggests that we are close to the innermost mystery of the service. That is the case. The scroll is to be eaten. It will taste good but will turn sour in the stomach. That may be the image of an early Mass. It can also be a way of saying that the written law seems appealing but leaves a bitter after taste. In either event, whatever it signifies, this is the final event of the liturgy, because the narrator is counseled to once again utter prophecies, which suggests that this is not what he has been doing for a while. He had not. He had gone to a church service.
The important point is that conceiving of a future history as liturgical makes it visual and so, in that sense, more real than would be the case if religious ideas were only expressed as emotions or ideas. What we want from religion, at least in part, is to know the truth as a matter of our senses, and people trust their eyes more than their other senses. Moreover, what we also want from religion, at least in part, is that it is triumphal, that it moves towards and accomplishes its ends rather than lies there like another part of the existential condition or as a description of the rest of our existential condition. There is the ordinary world of Liberal Protestantism where God is present as the meaning of friendship and love and obedience and so, therefore, is betokened by a hug, a tear, or a bow. But for some, that will not satisfy. They want God to enter into the world rather than to be expressed by events within it. That is why Evangelical Protestants think so highly of “Revelations”. It gives a context that is always present in the mind subjectively as a clue to the invisible reality that can be a visible reality. “Revelations” is of less interest to those, like Adolf Harnack, who see secular history or church history as the unfolding of the immanent or true history of the world, Harnack more interested in accounting to history and to real life for the meaning of his religious experience, which is what some would take to be merely an interpretation of religion or an application of religion rather than displaying the purity of a religious spectacle. The followers of “Revelations” will think this a very pale religion indeed.
“Revelations” is, instead, like a Spielberg movie in which the aliens arrive in their spaceships and land in Central Park. When that time comes, everybody will see it happening and we will gape in awe at what whatever will be the next thing the aliens will do: greet our emissaries or kill them? Show us powers that will seem to us like magic? Declare new moral guidelines? (One of the first things they do, according to Arthur C. Clarke, is to ban bullfighting.) Nothing merely symbolic rather than these actual events in future history will satisfy John of Patmos as a religious vision. It has to happen, not symbolically, but actually, which means as a visual event that was not there before but is there afterwards. In that case, disaster is the way to imagine the relation of subjective to objective life. Ordinary life is subjective because it is invisible: comfortable, sane, and dependable. Extraordinary life is objective: its imperatives intervene; it is made up of clearly seen events. In ordinary life, the subjective is full of garish scenes and the objective is full of relationships. Religion reverses this relationship. Objective life will be garish and subjective life will cease to be. At the moment, we know this only in our imaginations, and we cannot let that bleed out too much into ordinary life lest we seem perverse or mad. Freud may have gotten it right after all: our religious angels make objective the turmoil within us.