For my 666th post: What would it take to get progressive Christians to...

[hvn_nbr_2]

consider the possibility that the book of Revelation doesn't mean what fundamentalists claim it means or that it might actually have a progressive (and even coherent!) spiritual message?

(BTW, I realize that the latest scientific imaging techniques applied to the most ancient documents reveal that the beast's real number is 616, not 666. But 666 is so ingrained in our culture, and I'm already past 616 posts.)

Any time I've ever tried to tell liberal Christians about a progressive way to read Revelation (that, by the way, takes it just as it is, doesn't slice and dice and chop it apart to get it to fit like the fundies do), the response is one of these:

• they change the subject,
• they leave the room,
• they say they don't like or disagree with Rev (because they accept the fundies' interpretation)
• they say that Rev is worthless and meaningless drug-addled hallucinations, or
• they pretend that I don't even exist.

Once I gave a talk about it at a neopagan conference--pagans filled the room, and the room had more people in it at the end of the talk than at the beginning; but liberal Christians just won't even listen to the very word "Revelation." What's up with that?

[Lydia Leftcoast]

1. I don't know which liberal Christians you're talking about

I've never heard anyone think of Revelation as a taboo subject.

[RevCheesehead]

2. Hell, in some places, liberal Xtns are afraid of the bible. period.

Thanks to the social justice and liberalism movements of the 19th century, many Christians simply stopped trying to reconcile the Bible from what they knew in their hearts was right - social justice. Unfortunately, many denominations have become semi-illiterate, biblically. Whenever anyone hears Revelations, they immediately think apocalypse/end of the world, and tune out. I know I do. :evilgrin:

[hvn_nbr_2]

4. Ah, apocalypse, end of the world ---> tune out

That's exactly what happens, I think. Strange actually, because Revelation doesn't say anything at all about the end of the world, and in fact it says directly that heaven happens right here on this earth. Fantasies about going up to the sky and sitting on clouds directly and clearly contradict Rev.

Another interesting thing about Rev is that it isn't even a book of predictions, and it says so itself. The instructions given to John are (approximate quote), "Write in a book the things that you have seen, and the things that are, and the things that must happen hereafter." In other words, it's about past, present, and future. A lot of it had already happened when John wrote it. There was a thread here recently about preterism (belief that most or all of prophecy has already been fulfilled) (Hi, Taverner!), and preterists are clearly at least partly right.

Social justice and reconciling the Bible with what people know is right. I think you're raising the question (or at least touching on it): How could a God who is love and instructs us to love our neighbor also order his people to kill every man, woman, boy, and cow of a neighboring tribe and take the virgin girls for slaves? Why is there so much frankly evil, horrendous stuff that is praised as good in "the good book?" And why would I want to bother with that kind of book? Interestingly, I think the whole point of Rev is to address and answer that question, which is not really a new, modern question. In a general sense, that's part of what got Jesus in trouble with the authorities (His compassion led him to do work--rescued a cow, I think it was, and did healings--on the Sabbath), and it was an issue in the first century when Rev was written. I'll say some more about that in another response on this thread, but things are really busy for me right now and I'm not sure when I'll get back to this.

[shimmergal]

3. Hmm. Interesting question. And observations.

I can believe your experience at the neopagan conference. Neopagans appreciate the value of fantasy-like images. (One reason the fundies are so opposed to them--it's competition.)

As for a liberal Christian approach, I'm afraid my initial reaction is usually like the Rev. Cheesehead's. Actually I'd like to hear, or read, a good liberal Christian explication of Revelations. Why don't you write an article about it? The Christian Century might be interested (there are probably other magazines too, but that's the most appropriate one that occurs to me.)

[hvn_nbr_2]

5. A progressive liberal view of Revelation

You asked for it, and finally, here it is: a progressive liberal view of Revelation

First things to know about Revelation
It's not a book of predictions and it's not about the end of the world.

It says so itself, clearly and explicitly. John, the author of Rev, is told to "write in a book the things that you have seen, the things that are, and the things that must happen hereafter." If it was a book of predictions, it would be only "the things that must happen hereafter." When it talks obviously about the Roman Empire, it means the real Roman Empire, not some fundamentalist fantasy of a "revived" non-Roman non-Empire today. The Roman Empire was, to John in his day, part of the "things that are."

At the end of the story, it also says quite clearly that heaven comes down to earth. Nobody flies off into the sky to get to heaven.

One sentence summary of Revelation
The real story of Rev is the contrast between a primitive, fear-based, rules-centric, highly formalized and ritualized religion and an advanced, love-based, trust-centric, mystical (in the sense of having direct experience of God) religion, and of how the fear-based religion evolves into a love-based religion.

A couple general comments
Rev is highly organized and intricately constructed to show transitions from fear-based religion to love-based religion and to concurrently develop several parallel themes. Below in "The explication," I'll explain how it describes the primitive form of religion in the beginning and the advanced form at the end of the story, and I'll give a few examples of how the transitions appear along the way through the story.

One meta-theme is to explain how contradictions in scripture happen. For example, the Bible says you must fear God, then it says you must love God, then it says there is no fear in love. That's irreconcilable logic. John's answer is that the same set of scriptures describes both kinds of religion, and he shows how to sort out one from the other. A second meta-theme explains why scripture sometimes claims that God is so ungodly. For example, God says to love your neighbor, but he also commanded the Israelites to murder every man, woman, boy, and cow of a neighboring tribe and take their virgin girls for slaves. In the context of Rev's two kinds of religion, "love your neighbor" comes from one paradigm of religion while "kill your neighbors and their cows" comes from the other paradigm.

Parallel themes in Revelation. Rev discusses the big issues of religion in the context of the two contrasting paradigms of religion: What is God's nature? What is the nature of humans? What is the proper relationship between God and humans? What is the destiny of humans? Obviously the two paradigms have quite different answers to those questions, and Rev explores how the two paradigms view those big questions, as well as how points between those two extremes view them. Additionally, Rev manages to explore some additonal themes in parallel, such as the nature of human political power relationships and the history and future of war and oppression. It even shows a highly stylized history of the development of both Jewish-Christian and Greek religious thought. (Rev was, after all, written in Greek, in the Hellenistic world, for a Greek audience.) And everything in all these explorations and theme developments is in exactly the place in Revelation where that viewpoint on that theme makes sense! That's why I say it is so organized and so intricately constructed.

Some problems in reading and understanding Rev
People read into it a lot that just isn't there, because of their assumptions and theology. (Example: the end of the world. It just flat-out isn't there.)

People ignore a lot that is plainly and clearly there, because it contradicts their assumptions. (Example: They ignore the clear statement that it isn't a book of predictions.) In a few places in Rev, John is extraordinarily heretical by conventional Christian doctrine, and everybody just blithely ignores what he says or pretends he didn't say it or said something else.

People, particularly fundamentalists with their scenarios and timetables and politics, shuffle and shred Rev, rip it apart and put it back together in a sequence that fits their scenarios. But in fact, Rev makes perfectly good sense just exactly as it is, in the sequence it is. When John tells a story three different times in three different ways, there's a reason: he's telling it from three different points of view along the path from fear-based to love-based religion.

The explication
Rev describes two scenes of heaven, one at the beginning and one at the end. The two heavens couldn't be more different, and the God and religion described in the two heavens couldn't be more different. The two heavens describe the two kinds of religion that I've been talking about.

Using "H1" to describe the first, beginning heaven and "H2" to show the second, ending heaven, here are some of the differences.

H1: God sits anthropomorphically on a throne.
H2: God is spirit, everywhere.

H1: God and heaven are up in the sky.
H2: God and heaven are right here on earth.

H1: Out of God's throne come scary or destructive things: thunder, lightning, and voices.
H2: Out of God's throne comes the river of the water of life, which brings healing and abundant good things.

H1: No people are anywhere close to God. Only 24 elders (authority figures) and four weird mythological beasts are even in the same place, and they are separated from God by a sea of dark glass.
H2: God dwells among His people and they see His face.

H1: Only a few people in heaven.
H2: Vast multitudes of people in heaven. (I would argue that one clever riddle in Rev shows that John was a universalist, i.e. he believed that all people go to heaven, one of John's heresies.)

H1: Mythological beasts that pronounce doom on humans are there.
H2: Mythological doom-saying beasts have disappeared from the story.

H1: People worship God by repetitive obsequious gestures and ever more fancy ritualistic words.
H2: People worship by serving and doing good, are intimately involved with God and are the bride of Christ.

H1: God does not even ackowledge people, their worship, or their praises; He is completely aloof. Then he sends all sorts of pain, plagues, and evil, for no stated reason.
H2: God pours out all sorts of good, wipes the tears from people's eyes, heals the nations, removes every sorrow, provides vast abundance of good things.

H1: Heaven is small, so small that you enter it through an ordinary door.
H2: Heaven is huge, almost as big as the earth itself, with 12 giant city gates

H1: Heaven is barren, stark, (frankly) boring, and with nothing of nature in it.
H2: Heaven is rich, beautiful, bountiful, has the river of the water of life, which nourishes trees and fruits.

Of course these two scenes of heaven describe the two kinds of religion that I mentioned. H1 shows a religion of fear, pain, destruction, authority and hierarchy, and obsequious ritual. H2 shows a religion of love, healing, equality, and mystical experience (experiencing God directly, seeing His face).

Everything in the story between H1 and H2 shows transitions from the first to the second heaven, from the first paradigm of religion to the second. There are transitional elements everywhere. Here are some examples of the transitional elements:

The weird doom-saying beasts gradually disappear from the story, and are completely absent by the end in H2.

In a scene midway through the story, John tells of hearing thunder and lightning coming from God's throne (H1) and the sound of many waters (H2's river of the water of life) also coming from God's throne at the same time.

God and people are vastly separated at the beginning and they both move toward each other throughout the story. For example, there is one curious image of people crossing a sea of glass mingled with fire. This shows people crossing that "sea of dark glass" that surrounded God in H1, and going through fire to get closer to God. God also moves from a point of aloof isolation to engagement with people in various ways until at the end He dwells among His people. Also God first claims a very small group of people as His, then larger and larger groups, until the final H2 has vast multitudes of people in it.

The cause and solution to human suffering change at each stage of the story. First, God sends destruction and suffering for no reason at all, but He claims a small group of people as His own to save. Then He sends destruction as punishment for sin, and saves those who follow His law. Then comes early Christianity in John's day, a "new song." But that isn't the end of John's story. Eventually... well, I'm not going to tell the whole rest of the story because that's where John starts getting to be a heretic. And besides, probably nobody read this far anyway.

BTW, this seems appropriate to be my 800th post. I get out of the "700 club" with a post that would get me kicked out of the other 700 Club.

[pelagius]

6. Great reading of Revelations!

Is this something you developed independently or are there book(s) you'd recommend in this vein for those of us interested in reading more?

[hvn_nbr_2]

7. No books (yet)

It's a view I developed independently. As far as I know, no one else has ever even noticed that the two scenes of heaven describe two completely different kinds of religion. So obviously they haven't noticed the many transitional elements between the two scenes. And I've never succeeded in getting anyone to even look at the two scenes in Rev to see if what I say is true.

Our religions, beliefs, doctrines, and dogmas are so full of irreconcilable opposites and atavistic evils claiming to be good, and we've become so accustomed from lifetimes full of indoctrination that we don't even notice (or at least have learned to pretend not to notice) and so we hold, or try to hold, opposite views simultaneously. When the first heaven describes an ugly religion of an unpleasant God in an unappealing heaven, it doesn't even register in people's minds.

John addresses the issue of mushed-together opposite beliefs in Rev. The whole introductory series of messages to seven churches, which precedes the "action" part of the story is a series of examples of God being inconsistent and unfair to some groups and favoring others and requiring more from some than from others and mixing together horribly blasphemous and wonderfully blasphemous and high-sounding but meaningless promises that everyone pretends not to notice. That mushed-together doesn't-make-any-sense set of introductory messages sets up the organized presentation of the evolving paradigms of religion that follow in the main part of the story. After making sense of the evolving paradigms, then you can see why the introductory messages are so confusing--because they reflect the confusing nature of our typically confused and conflicted states of belief. And you can go back to the introductory messages and sort them out into which parts of which paradigms they represent.

I hope to write a book about this some day, but to get a book published, you first have to find somebody somewhere who'll even listen to an introduction to what you want to write about (or else win the lottery and publish it yourself).

There are a few books that take a progressive view of Rev, but for the most part, they treat it as a disconnected unorganized collection of unrelated platitudes. The only one worth reading that I can think of offhand is Rossing's (I forget her first name, but you can find it on any of the online bookseller sites) "The Rapture Exposed." As the name suggests, it's about the rapture idea, and anything about Rev is only a part of the book. One interesting thing about that book is that she even gets that the symbolism of Armageddon doesn't make any sense in the usual interpretation: A double-edged sword coming out of the mouth of the Word of God (i.e. Jesus, in the context) is a horribly inept symbol for military power that defeats all the armies. I think she goes slightly wrong though in interpreting it as being about preaching and proselytizing (in a typical Christian preaching and proselytizing way ;-)). I see it as more generally God's truth is stronger than all the military might of the world; if it was about preaching and proselytizing, then the sword would be swords coming out of the mouths of all the followers of Jesus.