The Theology of the Book of Revelation

by Richard Bauckham

  Thus John interprets the divine name as indicating not God’s eternity in himself apart from the world, but his eternity in relation to the world. This is the biblical God who chooses, as his own future, his coming to his creation, and whose creation will find its own future in him (cf. 21:3). Moreover, this interpretation of the divine name is in significant continuity with the meaning of Exodus 3:14, which most probably is referring not to God’s self-existence purely in himself so much as to his commitment to be who he will be in his history with his people. John has characteristically developed that early Israelite faith in God’s historical being for his people into the later, eschatological faith in God’s final coming to bring all things to fulfilment in his eternal future.

  THE LORD GOD THE ALMIGHTY

  This designation occurs seven times in Revelation (1:8; 4:8; 11:17; 15:3; 16:7; 19:6; 21:22), four of these in close association (1:8; 4:8; 11:17) or close proximity (16:5–7) to the designation we have just discussed. A shorter form, ‘God the Almighty’, is used twice (16:14; 19:15), keeping the number of occurrences of the full expression to no more than the significant number seven.

  This designation is also connected with the divine name, since it is a standard translation of the expanded form of the divine name: γHWH ’elōhē (ha) ebā’ ōt (the LORD, the God of hosts’) (e.g. 2 Sam. 5:10; Jer. 5:14; Hos. 12:5; Amos 3:13; 4:13). John also uses it (as comparison of Rev. 4:8 with Isa. 6:3 will show) as equivalent to the shorter form γHWH ebā’ ōt (‘the LORD of hosts’), which is very common in the Old Testament prophets because it indicates Yahweh’s unrivalled power over all things and therefore his supremacy over the course of historical events. Its use in Revelation testifies to John’s desire to continue the prophetic faith in God. The Greek pantokratōr (‘almighty’) indicates not so much God’s abstract omnipotence as his actual control over all things.

  THE ONE WHO SITS ON THE THRONE

  This is the last of the four most important designations of God in Revelation. In this precise form it occurs seven times (4:9; 5:1; 7, 13; 6:16; 7:15; 21:5), though variations of it are also used (4:2, 3; 7:10; 19:4; cf. 20:11). In addition, the throne itself, on which God sits in heaven, is mentioned very frequently. It is one of the central symbols of the whole book. It indicates how decisive for the theological perspective of Revelation is faith in God’s sovereignty over all things.

  The significance of the image of the throne emerges especially in the vision of the divine throne-room in chapter 4. After the vision of the risen Christ with his people on earth (1:9–3:22), John is taken up into heaven (4:1). This gives the whole prophecy two starting-points: the situation of the seven churches, as perceived and addressed in Christ’s messages to them, and the vision of God’s sovereignty in heaven. It is the latter which makes it possible for John to enlarge his readers’ perspective on their own situation by setting it within the broader context of God’s universal purpose of overcoming all opposition to his rule and establishing his kingdom in the world. In chapter 4 God’s sovereignty is seen as it is already fully acknowledged in heaven. This establishes it as the true reality which must in the end also prevail on earth. On earth the powers of evil challenge God’s role and even masquerade as the ultimate power over all things, claiming divinity. But heaven is the sphere of ultimate reality: what is true in heaven must become true on earth. Thus John is taken up into heaven to see that God’s throne is the ultimate reality behind all earthly appearances. Having seen God’s sovereignty in heaven, he can then see how it must come to be acknowledged on earth.

  Visions of the divine throne go far back into the Old Testament prophetic tradition (cf. 1 Kings 22:19–23) and were a significant feature of many of the Jewish apocalypses.4 John writes within this tradition and in particular his vision, like most of those in the apocalypses, draws on the two great prophetic visions of the divine throne in Isaiah 6 and Ezekiel 1. Also like the Jewish apocalyptists, John locates the divine throne in heaven, where heavenly beings engaged in continuous worship surround it. There is nothing in chapter 4 which could not have been written by a non-Christian Jewish visionary. Only in the continuation of the vision in chapter 5, which introduces the Lamb, Jesus Christ, as the one who is to bring God’s rule into effect on earth, and which we shall examine in our next chapter, does the specifically Jewish Christian character of Revelation’s theology become apparent. But, of course, the absence of distinctively Christian features from chapter 4 by no means diminishes its foundational importance for the theology of Revelation. In Revelation, as elsewhere in the New Testament, the Christian faith in God presupposes Jewish monotheism. It takes up the principal features of the understanding of God in the Old Testament and later Jewish tradition, without which it would be unintelligible, into a distinctive theological development determined by Christology. The christological development will concern us in our next chapter. Here we are concerned with the indispensable expressions of Jewish monotheism in Revelation.

  Like most apocalyptic visions of the divine throne, John’s does not dwell on the visible form of the One who sits on the throne. All that is said of God’s appearance is that it was like precious stones (4:3): this was one of the traditional ways of evoking the splendour of a heavenly figure. The unknowable transcendence of God is protected by focussing instead on the throne itself and what goes on around it. It is in these features of the vision that what can be known of God is expressed. Especially prominent in the vision is the continuous worship by the four living creatures and the twenty-four elders. It is a scene of worship into which the reader who shares John’s faith in God is almost inevitably drawn. We are thereby reminded that true knowledge of who God is is inseparable from worship of God. The song of the four living creatures and the hymn of the twenty-four elders express the two most primary forms of awareness of God: the awed perception of his numinous holiness (4:8; cf. Isa. 6:3), and the consciousness of utter dependence on God for existence itself that is the nature of all created things (4:11). These most elemental forms of perception of God not only require expression in worship: they cannot be truly experienced except as worship.

  The vision mixes cultic and political imagery. Cultic imagery is prominent because the throne-room is the heavenly sanctuary (later explicitly so: 11:19; 15:5–8), prototype of the earthly temple. The living creatures (who combine the features of Isaiah’s seraphim [Isa. 6:2] and Ezekiel’s cherubim [Ezek. 1:5–14]) are the heavenly prototypes of the two cherubim who flanked the mercy-seat in the holy of holies in the earthly temple (Exod. 25:18–22). They are heavenly beings whose existence is entirely fulfilled in the worship of God. Their ceaseless worship at the heart of all reality, around the divine throne, represents the theocentric nature of all reality, which exists ultimately to glorify God. They are therefore the central worshippers whose worship is taken up by wider circles. These wider circles expand – through chapters 4 and 5 – to include all creatures in the whole cosmos (5:13). In this worship of God and the Lamb by the whole creation (5:13) the eschatological goal of God’s purpose for his creation is already anticipated. Appropriately, therefore, the living creatures, who continually express creation’s worship with this goal in view, join their own ‘Amen!’ to it when the goal is reached (5:14).

  It is worth noticing how far from anthropocentric is this vision of worship. Humanity is radically displaced from the centre of things where human beings naturally tend to place themselves. At its heart and in its eschatological goal the creation is theocentric, orientated in worship towards its Creator. But even among the worshippers human beings are not pre-eminent. The four living creatures who lead the worship of the whole creation are not portrayed as anthropomorphic beings, as angelic beings often are. Only the third has a face resembling a human face. The others resemble a lion, an ox and an eagle, and with their six wings and myriad eyes all have a heavenly superiority to all earthly creatures (4:6–8). Their representative function is to worship on behalf of all creatures, and therefore it is fulfilled when the circle of
worship expands to include not only humans, but ‘every creature in heaven and on earth and under the earth and in the sea’ (5:13).

  As well as cultic imagery, there is political imagery. The throne-room is the place from which God exercises his rule over the world. The twenty-four ‘elders’ – a political, rather than cultic term – are the angelic beings who compose the divine council (cf. Isa. 24:23; Dan. 7:9; 2 Enoch 4:1; T. Levi 3:8). As their own thrones and crowns indicate (4:4), they are themselves rulers. They rule the heavenly world on God’s behalf. They too worship, but significantly they do so by an act of obeisance in which they get down from their thrones, remove their crowns and lay them before the divine throne (4:10). Thus they acknowledge that, as created beings (4:11), their authority is wholly derivative from God’s. He alone is to be worshipped as the source of all power and authority.

  The combination of cultic and political images to portray God as the acknowledged source and goal of all things was already traditional in apocalyptic visions of God. But it also corresponds significantly to the religio–political context of Revelation. The Roman Empire, like most political powers in the ancient world, represented and propagated its power in religious terms. Its state religion, featuring the worship both of the deified emperors and of the traditional gods of Rome, expressed political loyalty through religious worship. In this way it absolutized its power, claiming for itself the ultimate, divine sovereignty over the world. And so in effect it contested on earth the divine sovereignty which John sees acknowledged in heaven in chapter 4. The coming of God’s kingdom on earth must therefore be the replacement of Rome’s pretended divine sovereignty by the true divine sovereignty of the One who sits on the heavenly throne. Significantly, this conflict of sovereignties is often portrayed in the rest of Revelation by references to worship. Rome’s usurpation of divine rule is indicated by the universal worship of the beast (e.g. 13:4, 8, 12), whereas the coming of God’s kingdom is indicated by universal worship of God (15:4; cf. 19:5–6). In the conflict of sovereignties the lines are drawn between those who worship the beast and those who worship God. Every stage of God’s victory – through chapters 7–19 – is accompanied by worship in heaven. The issue of true and false worship is fundamental to John’s prophetic insight into the power-structures of the world his readers lived in. In the end, the book is about the incompatibility of the exclusive monotheistic worship portrayed in chapter 4 with every kind of idolatry – the political, social and economic idolatries from which more narrowly religious idolatry is inseparable.

  THE CRITIQUE OF ROMAN POWER

  We have indicated how the vision of God in chapter 4 correlates with the religio–political context John addresses in Revelation. It will be useful at this point to interrupt our discussion of chapter 4 in order briefly to sketch that context as Revelation portrays it. The theology of Revelation is highly contextual. The question of who God is, which the vision of chapter 4 addresses, related very closely to the world in which John’s readers lived. This is not to say that the context determines the understanding of God, because one could equally well say that it is the understanding of God which determines the way John, as a prophet, perceives the context. But we need to understand the correlation between the understanding of God in Revelation and Revelation’s critique of Roman power if we are fully to understand both.

  Our question is how John, with prophetic insight, perceives the Roman Empire. Revelation itself allows no neutral perception: either one shares Rome’s own ideology, the view of the Empire promoted by Roman propaganda, or one sees it from the perspective of heaven, which unmasks the pretensions of Rome. Revelation portrays the Roman Empire as a system of violent oppression, founded on conquest, maintained by violence and oppression. It is a system both of political tyranny and of economic exploitation. The two major symbols for Rome, which represent different aspects of the empire, are the sea-monster (‘the beast’: especially chapters 13 and 17) and the harlot of Babylon (especially chapters 17–18). The beast represents the military and political power of the Roman Emperors. Babylon is the city of Rome, in all her prosperity gained by economic exploitation of the Empire. Thus the critique in chapter 13 is primarily political, the critique in chapters 17–18 primarily economic, but in both cases also deeply religious. The beast and the harlot are intimately related. The harlot rides on the beast (17:3), because the prosperity of the city of Rome at the Empire’s expense and her corrupting influence over the Empire rest on the power achieved and maintained by the imperial armies.

  Although the Empire is a system of tyranny and exploitation, John is entirely aware that it was not resisted or opposed by most of its subjects. In the great cities of the province of Asia, for example, which John knew well, many were enthusiastic about Roman rule. This was partly because some provincials personally benefited from the Empire. In Revelation’s terminology, these were especially ‘the kings of the earth’, that is, the local ruling classes whom Rome co-opted to participation in her rule and whose own privileged position in society was thereby bolstered, and ‘the merchants of the earth’, who profited from Rome’s economic prosperity. But more generally, Rome’s subjects were persuaded to accept and to welcome her rule by the ideology of the Empire, which John effectively portrays in two different aspects corresponding to the beast and the harlot. To take the latter first, although the harlot lives well at her clients’ expense, she also offers them something (17:4) – the supposed benefits of Roman rule. This is no doubt the ideology of the pax Romana,5 vigorously promoted throughout the first century AD, according to which Rome’s gift to the world was the peace and security Rome provided within the borders of her empire and thereby the conditions of the Empire’s prosperity. Rome, the self-proclaimed eternal city, offered security to her subjects, and her own dazzling wealth seemed a prosperity in which her subjects could share. But Revelation portrays this ideology as a deceitful illusion. It is the wine with which the harlot intoxicates the nations, offered in the cup whose exterior is golden, but which contains abominations (17:2, 4). The spurious attraction of the Roman ideology it is one of the purposes of John’s prophecy to expose.6

  The other aspect of the ideology, portrayed in chapter 13, is the worship of power. In 13:3–4, the beast receives a mortal wound in one of its seven heads, but the wound is healed, to the amazement of the people of the world: ‘They worshipped the dragon, for he had given his authority to the beast, and they worshipped the beast, saying, “Who is like the beast, and who can fight against it?” ’ The wounded head of the beast is the emperor Nero, who committed suicide with a sword (cf. 13:14).7 This wound to a head of the beast was also a mortal wound to the beast itself (the imperial power), and it is the beast which recovers. The allusion is to the events immediately before and after the death of Nero in which it seemed likely that the Empire itself might disintegrate. To many of his subjects Nero’s tyranny was obvious and hated: in his case the true nature of the beast became more apparent than usual. Towards the end of Nero’s reign there were serious revolts in the provinces. His death was followed by the chaotic ‘year of the four emperors’. But the imperial power recovered with the Flavian dynasty. From the brink of collapse it emerged as apparently invincible, so that, according to the vision, the whole world cried, ‘Who is like the beast, and who can fight against it?’ The words are a parody of the celebration of God’s power in the Song of Moses (Exod. 15:11: ‘Who is like you, O LORD?’). They point to the absolutizing of political and military power which was expressed in the worship of Rome and the Roman emperors.

  In chapter 13 John recognizes two sides to the imperial cult. On the one hand, the beast blasphemes: it gives itself divine names and claims divinity (13:1, 5). In other words, it absolutizes itself by claiming the religious loyalty due only to the ultimate power of God. But John also recognizes that the imperial cult was not imposed on unwilling subjects. It was the spontaneous response of Rome’s subjects to her apparently invincible power (13:3–4). The second beast or earth-mons
ter (13:11), elsewhere in Revelation called the false prophet (16:13; 19:20), who promotes the imperial cult by setting up the image of the beast, giving it godlike characteristics, and enforcing its worship, probably represents the imperial priesthood in the cities of the province of Asia. The imperial cult in these cities originated from the initiative of the cities themselves. But from John’s prophetic viewpoint it was dangerous idolatry nonetheless, because it deified political and military power. The imagery of 13:16–17, restricting all economic transactions to those who are certified as worshippers of the beast, is no doubt deliberately exaggerated beyond current practice, in order to highlight the totalitarian direction in which the logic of the absolutizing of power in political religion points.

  Thus it is a serious mistake to suppose that Revelation opposes the Roman Empire solely because of its persecution of Christians. Rather Revelation advances a thorough-going prophetic critique of the system of Roman power. It is a critique which makes Revelation the most powerful piece of political resistance literature from the period of the early Empire. It is not simply because Rome persecutes Christians that Christians must oppose Rome. Rather it is because Christians must dissociate themselves from the evil of the Roman system that they are likely to suffer persecution. In fact, the full-scale persecution of the church which John foresees was not yet happening when he wrote. Though there had been martyrdoms (2:13; 6:9–10; 16:6; 17:6), it is clear from the seven messages to the churches that persecution was only sporadic and local. But John sees that the nature of Roman power is such that, if Christians are faithful witnesses to God, then they must suffer the inevitable clash between Rome’s divine pretensions and their witness to the true God.