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G. B. CAIRD
On
Deciphering the Book of Revelation
I. Heaven
and Earth
BY THE REVEREND G. B. CAIRD, D.PHIL., D.D., MANSFIELD COLLEGE, OXFORD
I
There is a room lined with maps on which someone has
placed clusters of little flags. A man in uniform is busy moving some of
the flags from one position to another. It is war time, and the flags
represent units of a military command. The movement of flags may mean
one of two things: either that changes have taken place on the
battlefield with which the map must be made to agree, or that an order
is being issued for troop movements, and the flags are being moved to
the new positions the units are expected to occupy. In the first case
the movement of flags is descriptive in the second case determinative.
This parable does not give us anything like the
whole truth about the use of imagery in the Book of Revelation, but it
does start our study off at the right place. For the basic assumption of
the book is that there is a war on—the war between the kingdom of God
and the kingdom of Satan. And when John tells us that he heard a voice
calling him up to heaven (41),
he means us to understand that he was being admitted to the control room
at Supreme Headquarters. The strange and complex symbols of his vision
are, like the flags in our parable, the pictorial counterpart of earthly
realities; and these symbols too may be either descriptive or
determinative. John sees some things happen in heaven because God has
determined that an equivalent event should shortly happen on earth, but
other heavenly events take place because earthly events have made them
possible.
It is not necessary at this stage to illustrate
John's use of determinative symbols, though it is perhaps worth noting
that he holds a carefully qualified belief in predestination. Only they
attain to ultimate salvation whose names are written from the foundation
of the world in the book of life (178),
yet it is possible for a name to be erased from the book (35).
The decrees of God are not, it seems, irreversible, but wait upon the
acceptance or rejection of men. It will suffice for the moment to give
one example of the descriptive type of symbol. When John tells us (127ff)
that there was war in heaven, with Michael winning a decisive victory
over Satan, some commentators express surprise that it should be Michael
and not Christ who is God's champion. The point is, however, that, when
this victory is won in heaven, Christ is on earth, on the Cross. Because
He is part of the earthly reality He is not part of the heavenly
symbolism. The heavenly chorus, ever ready to interpret John's visions,
explains that the victory has been achieved by the sacrifice of the of
the Lamb. Michael's victory is simply the heavenly and symbolic
counterpart of the earthly reality of the Cross. Michael, in fact, is
not the field officer who does the actual fighting, but the staff
officer, who is able to remove Satan's flag from the heavenly map
because the real victory has been won on Calvary.
The idea that in heaven there is to be found a
complete representation or transcript of earthly reality is one which
John shares with the Jewish apocalyptic writers. In the visions of
Daniel, for example, the princes of Persia and Greece (Dn 1020f)
are the angelic representatives of the two empires, and the coming of
the prince of Greece is the heavenly equivalent of the invasion of
Persia by Alexander the Great. This curious convention of apocalyptic
writing is not to be confused with the Platonic doctrine that earthly
things are the imperfect shadows of the perfect realities in heaven.
This is made clear by what John tells us about the seven churches. They
are represented by two symbols, the star in the right hand of Christ and
the lampstands among which He walks: the seven stars are the angels of
the seven churches, and the seven lamps are the seven churches (120).
The churches, in fact, have both an earthly and a heavenly aspect; but
the angels are not to be interpreted as the Platonic idea of a church,
the perfect archetype of which the earthly churches are imperfect
copies. For when the heavenly Christ dictates His letters to the
churches, they are addressed to the angels, who are clearly being held
responsible for everything, good or bad, that happens in the churches.
On the other hand, we are not to suppose that the life of the churches
is in any way determined by the conduct or character of the angels the
angels are simply their heavenly counterparts.
In the outward form of his work John is one
with the Jewish apocalyptists, and their writings frequently throw
superficial illumination on his. But in all deeper respects he is a
prophet ; indeed, he explicitly claims that his book is a prophecy. Now
a prophet is not just a man who can foretell the future, not even, as a
earlier generation of scholars believed, a preacher of the divine
justice; he is a man who has been admitted to the inner counsels of God.
Micaiah ben Imlah assured Ahab that he had seen God, surrounded by His
host of heavenly counsellors, and discussing with them questions of
policy and strategy (I K 2219f),
Amos declared that God never embarks on
any new enterprise without taking a prophet into His confidence (Am 37).
Jeremiah defined a prophet as one who had stood in the Privy Council of
the Lord (Jer 2318).
The prophet is, so to speak, a specially privileged newspaper reporter,
who has been summoned to a session of the General Staff, so that he can
disclose to the public how the war is going and what is to be expected
of them as their war effort. I have said that, in being called up to
heaven, John was being summoned to the control room at Headquarters. He
has been accused of inconsistency for not maintaining, this heavenly
standpoint throughout, since, for example, at 101
he tells of seeing an angel descend from heaven, as though he himself
were on earth. It is true that in some points of detail John's imagery
exhibits a dream‑like in consequence (how many altars were there in the
heavenly temple?). But in this respect he is entirely consistent; the
landscape of his heavenly vision is a complete cosmos with its own
heaven and earth. When we go to the theatre to see
Hamlet or
A Midsummer Night's Dream,
the time comes when we, the true audience, find ourselves watching a
stage audience watching a stage play. Similarly, John in the heavenly
theatre finds himself watching a drama the scene of which comprehends
both heaven and earth.
II.
We are now in a position to ask the question which
most readers of this book have asked, though without perhaps, intending
it as literally as we do: What on earth
is Revelation about? It is easy enough to say what Revelation is about:
two women, one clothed with earthly finery, one with heavenly; a dragon,
a monster, and a lamb; the great martyrdom, the fall of Babylon, the
Millenium, the descent of the Holy City. But what
on earth is it about?
These are heavenly symbols; to what earthly realities, past present, or
future, do they correspond? What is happening on the real battlefield
that accounts for this movement of flags?
At this point our military analogy begins to break
down, and we must leave it behind. At Army Headquarters one flag
corresponds to one unit, and nothing but confusion could result if a
single entity were represented by more than one symbol. John is a poet
who delights in the multiplication of images. The Monster which rises
from the Abyss, the Scarlet Woman, and Babylon, the great city, though
they are not exact synonyms, are certainly not symbols which stand for
three independent earthly realties. The three series of plagues
described under the symbolism of the seven seals, the seven trumpets,
and the seven bowls, are variations on the theme of judgment, and are
not to be allotted to three successive periods of world history. Any two
symbols may correspond to two distinct earthly events, but they may
equally well represent different aspects of the one event.
This fact about symbol language is illustrated by
a passage in the Gospels. Mark tells us (1538)
that at the moment of Jesus’ death the curtain which hung before the
Holy of Holies in the Temple was split from top to bottom. It is not
entirely clear whether he meant his readers to understand this literally
or metaphorically, whether he thought that the Crucifixion and the
splitting of the curtain were two separate events happening
simultaneously at different places or that the splitting of the curtain
was a figurative description of the implications of the Cross. In either
case Mark is referring to a concrete event but we have to decide whether
he thought the concrete event happened inside the Temple sanctuary or
outside the city on the hill of Golgotha; and to make the wrong choice
is to be guilty of the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. Matthew and
Luke who took the story from Mark, seem to have adopted the literalist
view; but if we consider Mark's account by itself and note that in his
Gospel (though not in the others) the
immediate consequence of the splitting of
the curtain was the centurion's confession of faith in Jesus as son of
God, we may well conclude that Mark was more sophisticated than his
followers and intended to describe a single event throughout the death
of Jesus which was for the centurion as for others, the rending of the
veil that had hidden from him the face of God.
John provides at the outset one very clear clue to
protect his readers from misplaced concreteness. God has granted him
these visions so that he may warn his Christian friends about things
that are to happen very soon; and he repeats, the time is running cut (I
1‑4).
But what earthly event or events did John expect to happen in the
immediate future? One thing at least is clear. We cannot do justice to
John’s very plain statement by saying that he foresaw a long series of
events beginning with persecution and ending with the Last Judgment, a
series covering centuries which could described as imminent only because
he expected it to begin
shortly. Whatever earthly realities correspond to John's heavenly
symbols, he expected them to be accomplished shortly in their entirety.
He is not concerned to give us a philosophy of history from the
Ascension to the Second Coming, though he may incidentally provide
material for those who are interested in such matters.
This initial note of time, repeated
emphatically in the last chapter, is one of the few things in John's
book which he intends us to take with simple literalness, and it appears
to confine us to a choice between two answers to our question. We may
say that what John expected to occur shortly was the End, the final
crises of world history, of which all else—the
last plagues, the emergence of the
Antichrist and his false prophet, the great martyrdom, the fall of
Babylon—were but premonitory signs, or that it was persecution of the
Church by heart, to which everything else in the book is related in the
same way as the rending of the curtain to the Crucifixion in Mark's
Gospel. The first of these explanations is the one most commonly
adopted, and I shall examine it in some detail in the third of these
articles. But the purpose of this series is to explore the second
explanation, and to argue that the concrete earthly reality underlying
John's visions is as narrow as the walls of a Roman courtroom where a
small company of Christians are on trial for their lives.
III
In the Interpreter's house Bunyan’s pilgrim was
perplexed at seeing a fire burning against a wall, which flamed the
higher when a man threw water on it, until the interpreter ‘had him
about to the backside of the wall, where he saw a man with a vessel of
oil in his hand’. It is the conviction of all prophetic religion that
history has such a backroom, into which the man of faith and vision can
look and see the secret, inner reality of the events through which he
must live. At the prayer of Elisha his servant's eyes are opened for a
moment to see the chariots of fire, which are just as real a part of his
environment as the Syrian chariots that have caused him to
lose his nerve. The dying Stephen sees at the right
hand of God the Son of Man to whom God has entrusted all authority and
judgment, and dies convinced that not only he but his accusers are on
trial, and that before a higher tribunal than the one which condemned
him.
I am contending that John’s whole purpose in
writing is to enable Christians who are put on trial before a Roman
magistrate to see ‘the backside of the wall’. He himself has had to face
a Roman judge; so has Antipas at Pergamum, with more serious
consequences. But these have been only isolated cases There has been no
widespread persecution since the days of Nero. But now Domitian is
demanding that all his subjects shall worship him as
Dominos ac Deus—Lord
and God; and in this demand John sees the signal for a general
persecution. It is true that all that his friends will be asked to do is
to burn a little incense before the Emperor's statue. There are people
in the churches—the Nicolaitans and the followers of the prophetess at
Thyatira whom John has dubbed Jezebel—who are arguing that the demands
of Rome are quite reasonable, not at all incompatible with faith in
Christ. Christians ought not to boggle at a political gesture of loyalty
to a benevolent and broad‑minded government. Against all such arguments
John insists that his friends shall see their position in its true
light. When any worldly empire demands of men the absolute loyalty and
obedience that is due to God alone, it is not a benevolent giant, but a
monster whose power is derived from Satan. To accede to its demands, to
accept the monster's brand mark, is to side with Satan in his agelong
battle against God. Those who remain loyal to Christ even at the cost of
their lives are the conquerors, the winners
of the great victory by which the ultimate doom of Satan and his
servants is sealed, and over which the choirs of heaven sing their
Hallelujah chorus. And if each individually is a conqueror, together
they are the winners of the final victory over Satan; for when the
former martyrs ask how long their vindication is to be delayed, they are
‘told to rest a little longer, until the number of their fellow servants
and their brethren should be complete, who were to be killed as they
themselves had been’ (611).
Only complete martyrdom can bring complete victory. Thus when the book
reaches its climax in the picture of the Last Battle, when He who rides
on the white horse, whose name is the Word of God, finally vanquishes
His enemies, we are not to suppose that John expected the fulfillment of
this heavenly vision in a literal, earthly battle, won by the use of
weapons quite different from those used in the first, decisive battle of
the Cross. Whatever heavenly symbols of victory John may use—and some of
them seem grim in their realism—there was for him on earth no other
victory than that of the Crucified and of those who, even on pain of
death, refused to deny their faith in His sole and saving grace.
It is generally agreed that the author of
Revelation was not the same man as the author of I John. But if that is
so, they certainly lived in the same province at the same time, and must
have known and influenced one another. And our John could well have
summed up all his argument in the words of his colleague: ‘this is the
victory that overcomes the world, our faith’ (I Jn
54).
He writes as one who has experienced the tribulation that is coming on
his friends (I9)
in order that, as they stand before a Roman judgment seat and hear the
judge pronouncing sentence on them, they may see beyond him to the great
white throne, from which come judgments that are just and true, and hear
the heavenly voices saying, ‘Fallen, fallen is Babylon the great . . .
for God has pronounced on her the sentence she passed upon you’ (182.
20).
On Deciphering the Book of Revelation
II.
Past and Future
BY
THE REVEREND G. B. CAIRD, D.PHIL., D.D., MANSFIELD COLLEGE, OXFORD.
I
In
my first article I pointed out that John in his opening sentence has
intimated the purpose of his book, which is to warn his friends of an
immediately impending crisis; and I put forward the hypothesis that the
only event which John expected to happen in the near future of Earthly
history was a general persecution of the Church by the Roman government,
and that the whole intention of the rich and varied imagery of his
heavenly drama was to nerve Christians for their coming ordeal by
helping them to see the indispensable contribution that their martyrdom
would make to the grand strategy of God's war against the forces of the
Abyss.
John's book is about the imminent future, but
his
future is not divorced from past and
present. In writing about the coming crisis he is bound to relate it to
the conditions of life out of which he expects it to arise, and
therefore his heavenly visions include a number of tableaux representing
not future events but past ones. It would clearly make our task of
deciphering John's symbolism much easier if we could draw a firm line
between the things that to John were already past and those that were
still to
future.
In the Book of Daniel this is not
difficult to do. The book purports to be written by a sixth century
prophet, who first recounts events
through
which he claims to
have lived, and then adds a series of visions which, with increasing
accuracy of detail, carry the reader down to the middle of the second
century. A superficial reader might draw the line between past and
future at the end of ch. 6, where the transition from record to vision
occurs. But it is generally agreed that the sixth‑century date is a
piece of literary convention that the author actually lived in the reign
of the persecutor, Antiochus Epiphanes (c 166 B.C.), and that the line
ought to be drawn between the emergence, of the little horn on the
fourth beast and its destruction (78-11),
between the setting up of the profaning sacrilege and its removal (813f
927
1131-35).
Can such a line be drawn within the Book of Revelation?
Many commentators have assumed that all we need to
do is to look at the structure of the book. John is commanded to write
‘what you have seen, what is, and what is to happen hereafter’ (I19);
and this, they assure us, is a threefold command which John obeys in the
three divisions of his book. ‘What you have seen’ refers to that which
is already past at the moment when the command is given,
i.e. the vision of
Christ in the first chapter. ‘What is’ refers to the condition of the
churches described in chs. 2-3.
‘What is to happen hereafter’ is
unfolded in the long vision of chs. 4-22. If this way of reading the
Revelation were correct, my hypothesis would at once go by the board;
for then clearly the persecution of the Church would be only one of a
whole series of premonitory portents of the End which John expected to
happen in his own day. But does this analysis really fit the facts? Is
not the command to write 'what you have
seen' most naturally taken to cover the whole of John's vision?
Do not the letters to the churches,
though consisting largely of appraisal, include both threats and
promises for the future? Do not the ensuing visions, notwithstanding the
invitation of 41
contain plentiful references to events that have already occurred?
This last point is so important that it is worth
treating in some detail. After the opening scene in the heavenly
throne‑room John records the breaking of the seven seals on the great
scroll. In a succession of visions he sees four horsemen representing
war, rebellion, famine; and pestilence,
then the souls of the martyrs resting
beneath the heavenly altar, then a cosmic catastrophe. Do these visions
represent successive events which John expected to happen in the
immediate future? There are two reasons for thinking that they do not.
The first is that the seals are broken by the Lamb, who has won the
right to open the scroll because ‘thou wast slain and by thy blood didst
ransom men for God from every tribe and tongue and people and nation’ (59).
If the Lamb won the right to unfold the scroll of the world's destiny in
A.D. 30, it is hardly to be supposed that John's theology required him
to abjure the exercise of that right until after A.D. 95. The opening of
the scroll is not the disclosure of events which are still future to
John, but the demonstration of Christ's lordship over world history
since His ascension. Because on the Cross He transformed human sin into
a means of redemption, He now has the authority to take the grimmest
consequences of sin and send them out into the world as agents of a
divine purpose. The second reason is that when John has his vision of
persecution, it is not a future Persecution but a past one that he sees.
Those who have already suffered martyrdom (probably in the reign of
Nero) are clearly distinguished from the rest of their brethren who are
about to be victims of a new onslaught. In this part of John's work,
then, the line between past and future is to be drawn immediately before
the Great Tribulation which John expected. He was not endeavoring to
comfort the prospective martyrs by assuring them that persecution was,
after all, only one of the coming disasters. He was reminding his
readers that the persecution would break out in a world order in which,
as they well knew from experience, other calamities constantly occurred,
but none of them outside the beneficent purpose of God or unaffected by
the victory of Christ.
The visions of the trumpets and bowls afford no
evidence to show how they are to be related to earthly time, but in the
central section of unnumbered visions (chs. 12‑14) we find ample
confirmation of the conclusion we have just reached. John sees rising
from the sea a Monster which incorporates characteristics of all four
beasts of Daniel's
vision, and which therefore is the epitome
of idolatrous and tyrannical power. Now we might argue that the Monster
is beyond cavil John's version of the Antichrist, that in both Jewish
and Christian apocalyptic expectation the coming of the Antichrist was
to be the immediate prelude to the End, and that John naturally looked
forward to this event as part of the approaching crisis. But our
argument will then founder on the rock of John's explicit statements
that the Monster ‘was and is not and is to come' (178),
and that its seven heads are ‘seven kings, five of whom have fallen, one
is, and the other has not yet come’ (1710).
However we attempt to identify the kings with Roman emperors—and this is
admittedly a ticklish matter—it is undeniable that at the time when John
is writing the Monster has already had a long and eventful history. What
is new in John's day is the demand that all men shall worship the
Monster, and it is precisely this demand which underlies Johns
premonition of imminent persecution. It is true that John also says of
the Monster that it ‘is to ascend from the bottomless pit’ (178),
but this ascent is not to be identified with its initial rising from the
sea. For at this point, by a curious shift of imagery, John identifies
the beast with one
of
its seven heads, the emperor who
especially embodied the demonic quality
of
the Monster, who was to come to life
again after having received a mortal wound. The ascent from the pit
means the reincarnation in a new emperor of the persecuting mania which
had manifested itself in Nero. Thus the vision of the Monster is
descriptive or interpretative, not predictive: it belongs to ‘what is’,
not to ‘what is to happen hereafter’. This is true also of the three
visions which precede the emergence of the Monster: the woman gives
birth to the male child represents the people of God giving birth to the
Messiah; the war between Michael and the Dragon is, as I have already
shown, the heavenly counterpart of Christ's victory on the Cross; and
the assault of the Dragon on the woman is Satan's attack on the Church
by temptations and deceit, the failure which prompts him to resort to
violence by giving his authority to the Monster, the totalitarian state.
There is, then, good reason for holding that in the
Revelation, as in the Book of Daniel, the line between past and future
is to be drawn, not at the obvious break in the literary structure, but
immediately before each reference to the coming martyrdom. This was the
crisis about which John was charged to give warning, and it was not for
him to blunt the urgency of his message by predicting that a whole
succession of other events must happen first. Whether he intended to
predict other events after the persecution is another question, to which
we must turn next month.
II.
f I am right in holding that the constantly
reiterated visions of plague and disaster were not part of the warning
John was commissioned to deliver, we mast now ask why he felt it
necessary to place his real warning in such an elaborate setting of woe
and calamity. He sees with the eye of a prophet, but he writes with the
pen of a pastor. No doubt he did actually see what he claims to have
seen. He need not have written it down in exactly the way he did, if he
had not intended thereby to discharge his pastoral responsibility to
those who might shortly be called to face martyrdom. I suggest,
therefore, that John uses these parts of his vision to say two important
things about the place of persecution in the purposes of God.
(1)
God allows persecution because of His infinite mercy.
‘It was given (Greek word)’ to the Monster ‘to make war on the saints
and to conquer them’ (13 7).
But John insists that this particular instance of divine permission must
not be
seen in
isolation. Over and over again the same word occurs like the stroke of a
great bell: ‘it was given to the rider to take peace from the earth’ (64);
‘it was given to them to harm earth and sea’ (72);
‘there was given to him the key of the shaft of the bottomless pit’ (911);
‘it was given to them to torture for five months but not to kill’ (95).
God allows evil to run its course. But why? John knows that the victims
of persecution will be tempted to think that God has forgotten both
their undeserved plight and His own justice. The truth is not that God
cares the less for justice but that He cares the more for mercy, not
that He has ceased to care for the martyrs but that He cares also for
their persecutors. With justice alone as His guide He would long since
have foreclosed on the world's bankruptcy and called men to their final
account. But He holds his hand to give them time to repent; and, because
He holds His hand, the innocent must suffer. Martyrdom like the Cross,
is the price of the divine forbearance.
John drives this point home particularly by what Dr.
Farrer has called his ‘cancelled conclusions’. Three times he gives us a
victim of world catastrophe under the symbols of the seven seals, the
seven trumpets, and the seven bowls. These series are not to be taken as
three independent waves of disaster. The number seven is the symbol of
completeness; the breaking of the seventh seal is the End, the seventh
trumpet is the Last Trumpet. Yet when the seventh seal is broken, the
seventh trumpet blown, the End does not in fact arrive. The conclusion
is cancelled by a new beginning. It may be that John records three
series of plagues be because he saw three series, It may be that he sets
down his visions with the skill of a consummate literary artist,
composing variations on the
theme of
divine judgment. But his reasons are also theological. God
Himself has His cancelled conclusions: ‘I will not make a full end’ (Jer
427). ‘Who knows, God may yet repent and turn from his fierce
anger, so that we perish not’ (Jon 39; cf. Joel 213).
God restrains and limits the fences of destruction which He has
permitted to work havoc on the earth, ‘not wishing that any should
perish, but that all should reach repentance’ (2 P 39). The
fourth horseman is given authority over a quarter of the earth, the
first four trumpets herald the ruin of a third of the cosmos, the great
earthquake destroys a tenth of the unholy city, in order that the rest
of mankind may be brought to repentance and submission (68 87-12
1113), and the reluctance of men to avail
themselves of the opportunity serves only to
emphasize the divine patience in granting
it (920-21).
John is convinced that in the end the time will come ‘for destroying the
destroyers of the earth’, when it will be too late for change of
character: ‘let the evildoer still do evil, and the filthy still be
filthy, and the righteous still do right, and the holy still be holy’
(2211).
But until then, beyond all human
expectation and deserving, even at the cost of martyrdom for His
servants, God will leave time for repentance.
(2) God allows persecution because of His infinite
holiness. If only we knew, say the martyrs, where it is all going to
end! It will end, says John, in the Holy City, into which nothing
unclean can come; so before the city can descend from God, evil must be
allowed to burn itself out. There is something self‑destructive in all
evil. It is a permanent characteristic of the Monster that it ‘is headed
for perdition’ (178).
The Monster and the Harlot represent
different aspects of the same pagan imperial power, but the time comes
when the Monster turns to rend the Harlot who had been enthroned on its
back (1716).
Yet this is not an impersonal nemesis, a self‑operating moral principle.
God wins His victories only through human servants. In His scroll of
destiny the sins of men which produce wars, famines, and pestilences are
transformed into the angelic, messengers of His judgment. But He will
not Himself open the scroll. He waits until some one on earth has won
the right to open it. It is only because of Christ's perfect submission
to God's will that sin’s instrument, the Cross, was transformed into
sin's destruction. It is only when others are found to bear with the
same obedience their witness to the power of the Cross that sin’s
destruction becomes complete. Sin must be allowed to gather all its
forces against the servants of God and to fall back defeated by their
loyalty and faith. ‘If anyone is to be taken captive, to captivity he
goes; if anyone is to be slain by the sword, by the sword must he be
slain. Here is a call for the endurance and faith of the saints’ (1310).
The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the
Church; it is also the ruin of Babylon, the Great Harlot, ‘drunk with
the blood of the saints’ (176).
On Deciphering the Book of Revelation
III.
The First and the Last
BY
THE REVEREND G. B. CAIRD, D.PHIL., D.D. Mansfield College, Oxford
I
It is said that a German professor, lecturing on
As
You Like It, emended the text of the
exiled duke's speech. ' Books in the running brooks, sermons in stones'
? No ! What the poet must have written was: 'Stones in the running
brooks, sermons in stones'. This story well illustrates the tendency of
prosaic critics to attribute to a creative writer a prosiness equal to
their own. The Bible has been one of the favourite haunts of such
critics. After all, could it not be assumed that the authors of the Old
and New Testaments, being for the most part simple and unlettered men,
living in a prescientific age, without even the abstract benefits of an
existentialist philosophy, must have been totally unable to distinguish
between myth and reality or between the literal and figurative senses of
the language they were using ? In 'the first two articles of this series
I have been arguing that, in fact, the author of Revelation was a highly
sophisticated person, in no danger of confusing the images of his vision
with the realities to which they corresponded. I new want to make the
same point with regard to his eschatology.
When I first began to explore the tangled and
opaque forest of New Testament eschatology, I thought that I could
discern three beams of clear light. Three statements surely could be
made without risk of contradiction. (1) The Early Church was almost, if
not quite, unanimous in expecting an imminent Parousia. (2) They thought
that they had the authority of Jesus for this expectation. (3) It did
not happen. I still obstinately retain my confidence in the last of
these three prepositions, but about the first two I am much lets sure.
For if we accept them, then with an
inexorable logic one of two conclusions seems to follow. Either Jesus
did in fact predict His own Parousia and the end of the present
transitory age within a generation of His death- an error which could be
put down either to a prophetic foreshortening of history or to a
limitation of knowledge inherent in the humanity of Jesus; or the early
Christians totally failed at this point to understand the teaching of
Jesus. It was my reluctance to accept either of these two improbable
solutions which led me to formulate a third, very tentative hypothesis:
that perhaps, after all things are not quite what they seem.
The hypothesis that the language of eschatology is
not to be taken at its face value has been used by C.
H.
Dodd and J. A. T. Robinson for strictly
limited purposes. Dodd, in support of his doctrine of 'realized
eschatology’, has argued that in eschatological passages of the Gospels
'future tenses are only an accommodation of language to express what is
in essence beyond time; but he has not seen fit to extend this principle
beyond the teaching of Jesus to cover the eschatology of the Primitive
Church. Robinson has proposed that the temporally ultimate should be
regarded as symbol for the logically ultimate, without apparently being
convinced that this was so in the intention of the New Testament
writers. Both these ideas have been attacked as the importation into
Scripture of unbiblical categories of thought. The whole weight of
modern scholarship for the last half century has been thrown into the
opposite side of the balance. There has been indeed a most formidable
agreement among scholars of vastly different shades of opinion that the
language of eschatology was intended by those who used it to be taken
literally.
Albert
Schweitzer, convinced that Jesus died in disillusionment at the failure
of His eschatological hope,
took refuge from his own conclusions in
mysticism. Rudolf Bultmann, assuming that both the spacial and the
temporal imagery of the New Testament are part of a world‑view outmoded
by modern science, has tried to release the existentialist kernel of the
gospel from its mythological husk.
H. ].
Cadbury, in a critique of Dodd, has assured us
that Luke- Acts not only takes eschatology literally, but in so doing
preserves the primitive gospel.
The Book of Acts does not spiritualize away
the concrete eschatological hopes of Christianity, ... It retains I am
persuaded, the old and literal expectation.’ Sigmund Mowinckel, taking
it for granted that eschatology has to do with the literal expectation
of the end of the present world order, and recognizing that pre‑exilic
writers of
the Old Testament frequently use the
language of eschatology to describe crises of a less cosmic and less
final character, has disposed of the embarrassing facts by denying that
there is any eschatology prior to the Exile.
Oscar Cullmann's idea of Biblical time as a
straight line bas been influential largely,
because it gives pictorial expression to
the dominant literalism.
I have chosen almost at random these five examples
of what seems to me to be the prevailing tendency in eschatological
studies. On this, heavily fortified position I propose to make an
attack, not by direct assault, but by undermining it from below. I
intend to argue that Biblical eschatology is a characteristic product of
the Semitic mind, which only Gentiles or pedants would dream of taking
literally; that its
primary concern is not with the future
but with the present; and that it is in fact a figurative way of
interpreting current history.
II
Let me open my case by disposing of the naive notion
that, where we find both a literal and a symbolic interpretation of
saying or event, the literal must necessarily be the more primitive. The
Book of Joshua records an excerpt from an early collection of ballads,
the Book of Jashar :
‘Sun, stand thou still at Gibeon,
And thou Moon in the' valley of
Aijalon’.
And the sun stood still,
and the moon stayed,
Until the nation tool, vengeance on their enemies.
Joshua's prayer was a highly poetic request that
he day would last long enough to ensure the complete rout of the enemy,
and the granting of ,
his request is described in equally
imaginative language.
It is the later prose writer who has taken
the poetry as prose and transformed the incident into grotesque miracle.
Similarly, Isaiah is speaking
metaphorically of the adulteration of the nation’s morals when he says:
‘Your silver has become dross, your wine
mixed with water.’ But the Septuagint translator, who seems to have had
a grudge against shopkeepers, has taken the saying literally: ‘Your
money is counterfeit, and the merchants have been putting water into the
wine.
These examples must suffice to indicate that the
literal is by no means always the primitive or the original.
I am not denying that sayings and stories
originally meant to be taken literally were frequently spiritualized or
allegorized.
All I am so far asserting is that there is
no one‑way traffic` between the literal and the symbolic. The precise
interplay of the literal and the symbolic in the language of eschatology
can be laid bare only by a
detailed investigation of the nature of Biblical
language and imagery; and I have here room only for two illustrations
In the first place, Biblical thought deals little
in abstractions and much in concrete, pictorial images. There is all the
difference in the world between concreteness of language and the sort of
literalism that confuses the sign with the thing signified. The
application of this point to eschatology is not difficult. When the
prophet depicts an age of peace in which the lion shall eat straw like
the ox, a literalist interpretation could only refer this vision to some
unearthly paradise beyond history.
But the earlier part of the poem makes it
clear that in fact the prophet has in mind an earthly reign of a Davidic
king, during which the administration of justice will still be necessary
; and he employs the imagery of paradise restored to idealize that
coming reign, much as Virgil idealized the newly established Pax Romana
in his
Pollio, which is
an imitation of this very passage from Isaiah.
If, however, we recognize the poetic nature
of prophetic eschatology, have we any business to introduce quite
different standards of interpretation in dealing with the wildly
proliferating concreteness of the apocalyptic writings ? I am prepared
to admit that there may have been a second‑rate type of apocalyptic who
pedantically worked over the visions of others. But certainly in the
case of the two great apocalyptists whose writings have won a place in
the Biblical canon, the authors of Daniel and Revelation, I should want
to argue, that they were no more concerned with the end of the age and
no less concerned with the historic crisis of their own day than any of
the prophets before them. When we are dealing with a language in which
abstract ideas are habitually clothed in concrete form, it is well not
to be too quick to conclude that those who used images intended them
literally.
The second point about Biblical language is that
Hebrew is a paratactical language rather than a syntactical one, that is
to say that its clauses, instead of being subordinated one to another,
are commonly strung together, with a connecting 'and', so that ideas,
sometimes quite mutually exclusive ideas, are placed beside one another
with no further indication of the relation between them than mere
juxtaposition. There is a good example of the effect of parataxis in Ps
19 3-4
‘They have no speech nor words, nor is their voice
heard;
Their voice has gone out into all the earth and
their utterance to the ends of the world’.
The Psalmist is clearly aware of the distinction
between the literal sense of the terms he uses in the first line and
their metaphorical sense in the second; but he does not bother to point
out the transition. This fact of Hebrew speech explains how it is that
the prophet can plead with Israel to repent, with promises of
forgiveness and restoration, and almost in the same breath pronounce an
absolute, unconditional sentence of doom. It explains also some of the
curious inconsistencies of eschatology. Mark has a whole chapter in
which he enumerates the premonitory sins that lead up to the day of the
Son of Man and concludes with the warning: 'Begin watching now; for you
do not know when the time will come’. Source critics detect here
composite origin and clumsy editing; but Mark is not apparently uneasy
about this juxtaposition, of incompatibles. Nor does Paul betray any
embarrassment when in ode letter to the Thessalonians he says, 'Watch,
for it may happen at any moment', and in the next, written probably a
few weeks later, ' Don't get excited, because it can't happen yet'.
III
It is now possible for us
to say something more positive about the nature of eschatology. When the
prophets looked forward to the future, they I did so in two ways, which
it will be profitable for us to distinguish, though they themselves
never kept them apart. On the one hand they predicted an historic crisis
which was to happen within
the time series, caused by recognizable historical conditions and
succeeded by predictable historical results. On the other hand they
looked forward to the absolute crisis of divine judgment beyond which
nothing could conceivably happen. But because the prophet's mind
inhabited superlatives by choice, the historic crisis was always
described in absolute terms;
and because Hebrew knows nothing of abstractions, the vision of eternity
was always clothed in intensely concrete imagery. The two crises,
therefore, always tended to coalesce, and the one inevitably called up
the other by association. The two pictures lay, paratactically, side by
side, in his mind. It was as
though they were the twin lenses of a stereoscope which could
be focused so as to merge into one synthetic vision. Amos' vision
of the end is clearly one of limited scope‑ 'the end has come upon my
people Israel'‑yet he sees the end of Israel's history against a
backdrop of cosmic catastrophe, when
the sun is to go down at noon and darken the earth in broad
daylight. One cannot but ask whether the end of which Jesus spoke was
not similarly the end for Israel, expressed in cosmic language.
This means that in a very
real sense all eschatology is realized eschatology, since
eschatological language is never employed independently of, its
concrete, historical embodiment and realization. This is why in the Old
Testament the Day of .the Lord is hardly ever mentioned but what it is
said to be at hand. In view of what I have already said, I am ready to
grant that the prophets may have seen their stereoscopic vision with
such clarity and absoluteness as to take their own eschatology literally
as well as figuratively. But
there is one certain test which can tell us whether the literal or the
figurative lay uppermost in their minds- the test of fulfilment.
When Jeremiah predicts the destruction of Jerusalem as the return
of cosmic chaos, and Jerusalem remains standing, he has to face the
question whether he is a false prophet, deceived by God.
But when Jerusalem falls, he regards this as the confirmation of
his prophecy, even though the world continues to tick on. Similarly, if
the New Testament writers had taken their eschatology with strict
literalness one would have expected the fall of Jerusalem in A.D. 70,
unaccompanied by a Parousia, to be an emergency of the first order for
Christian theology. But there is no sign that in fact it was so.
We have sometimes been
given the impression that apocalyptic writers went grubbing about among
the prophetic writings, picking up any
bits that had not been fulfilled in the prophet's own day, and
using them to construct a highly artificial eschatology.
It would, I think, be nearer the truth to say that, because the
prophets identified the historic crisis of their own day with the
eternal crisis, their prophecies
in toto were recognized to have a depth of meaning not exhausted by
their immediate fulfilment so that the prophecies became revelation,
shedding light not only on current history but on the nature of the
ultimate divine event. The uniqueness of Jesus lies in this, that He so
completely fulfilled all the prophecies as to transform men's conception
of the eschatological event; the Day of the Lord became forthwith the
Parousia of the Lord Jesus, in the light of which a11 future history
must be interpreted.
If there is any substance
in the case I have argued, it will be apparent that the author of
Revelation was no more expecting the end of the world than any of the
other prophets before him. He was expecting persecution in which he saw
the embodiment of the final judgment of God. In the midst of this trial
Christ the Judge would come, either to remove trio lampstand of the
faithless community or to reward the conqueror with a place in the City
of God. The choice which faced the Christian in the Roman law court was
whether he was to belong to the earthly city, whose permanent
characteristic is that ‘it goes to perdition’, or to the heavenly city,
whose permanent characteristic is that it' comes down out of heaven from
God '. The fall of Babylon and the coming of the heavenly city are
imminent future events in so far as they are involved in the decision of
the martyr to accept his share in the victory which overcomes the world.
On Deciphering, the Book of Revelation
IV. Myth and Legend
BY THE REVEREND G.B., CAIRD,
D.PHIL., D.D., MANSFIELD COLLEGE, OXFORD
I
One of the secondary characteristics of
all apocalyptic writing, so the authorities tell us, is the use
of bizarre animal symbolism.
We may well imagine an identical comment being made by a scholarly
historian of A.D. 2162 about the political cartoons of the twentieth
century. If we had not come
to accept them as a familiar convention, we should certainly find the
antics of the T.U.C. carthorse, the Republican elephant, and the
Democratic donkey obscure and odd. When we see an eagle, a lion, and a
bear together in a cartoon, we know that we are looking at a comment on
international affairs; but what would an observer from another century
make of such a picture? If
he had a considerable collection of cartoons he might find one in which
the eagle was perching on the shoulder of a thin old gentleman with a
goatee, another in which the lion was accompanied by a lady in armour,
another in which the bear carried a hammer in its left paw and a sickle
in its right. This would probably give him all the encouragement he
needed to write a learned article on how to decipher the bizarre animal
symbolism of the cartoonists.
Apocalypses, were the ancient equivalent of the
political cartoon, but with one important difference. Since their
inspiration was religious, their imagery tended to have deeper roots
than mere contemporary convention could provide. A better parallel to
the Book of Revelation than any of the examples given above is the
cartoon of St. George and the dragon, in which, St. George has the face
of a well known statesman. The cartoon portrays the statesman in the act
of slaying his political bete noire, but it does infinitely more than
this.
It identifies him with a national ideal of
crusading chivalry, proclaims him to be the incarnation of the
archetypal Englishman. For St. George is not just a symbol: he is a
myth.
A myth is commonly defined as a story
about the remote past told in order to
explain the facts, practices beliefs, or experiences of the present. But
this definition is altogether too broad Kiplings
Just So Stories
are charming fantasy, but not myth. Myth must have two further
qualities: it must enshrine some ultimate truth
or some universal aspiration; and it must
provide imagery whereby men in every age can interpret and express their
one experience. The story of the Garden of Eden is a true myth, not
became it gives a pseudoscientific explanation of the hardship of labour
and the pains of childbirth, but because it appeals to that deep‑seated
nostalgia which all men feel, though it conceals itself in many
disguises. It is therefore the essence of myth, that St. George should
appear, in a cartoon with the face of a modern statesman. For a story is
a myth only if it is capable of being re‑enacted in every generation by
those whose imagination has been awakened by its truth.
Without myth, there can be no such thing as
history. We must not dignify with the name of history the arid annals of
the dusty past. History is the story of the past, told with such
creative imagination that the reader, by a similar exercise of
imagination, may relive the events and find them revenant to his own
situation. The tragedy of our present age is not, as Rudolf Bultmann
would have us believe, that we belong to a scientific
world which has outlived the era of mythology and
needs to have the New Testament demythologized to make it intelligible
to the modern mind, having lost its myths, has therefore lost its way.
II
John tells us that, whey he was summoned up to heaven, be saw between
him and the throne ‘a sea of
glass like a sheet of ice’. This sea has been variously treated by the
commentators. Some have seen in it the counterpart of the laver in the
tabernacle, a symbol of that purity without which man may not approach
God. Others have regarded it as pure descriptive detail, intended to
enhance the majesty of the heavenly scene. Others again have supposed
that John was using a traditional symbol, the origin and meaning of
which had long since been forgotten.
In fact, however, the sea is one of the most important of John’s
archetypal images. It is first mentioned in a chapter which he
explicitly tells us is a vision of God the Creator.
Worthy art thou, our Lord and God,
to receive glory and honour and power;
for thou didst create all things,
and by thy power they came to be (411).
We shall therefore look for the origins of the sea in cosmology. But in
131 we are told that the Monster rose out of the sea, which
therefore appears to be a kind of reservoir of evil; and this view is
confirmed by 211, where the new heaven and earth are said to
contain ‘no more sea’.
Now in the Babylonian creation myth it is said that Marduk, the god of
light, went to battle with Tiamat, the primeval ocean monster, and
having killed her, cut her body in two like a flat fish, so to make
heaven out of one half and earth out of the other. We know from the
Ras Shamra tablets that this myth was current also among the
Canaanites. In the Old Testament it appears in a demythologized form in
Gn I, where the victory of light over chaos, the name Tehom (the Deep),
and the parting of the waters above the heaven from the waters under the
earth remain as echoes of the old story. Elsewhere the myth is stripped
only of ifs polytheism, and creation is represented as God's victory
over the chaos monster Rahab or Leviathan.
We must now recall that it is of the nature of myth
to be re‑enacted in the events of history; and this is precisely what we
find with the cosmic myth in the Old Testament. The God who scored an
initial, archetypal victory over the forces of chaos and evil by
dividing the sea at the Creation, did it again at the Exodus.
Thou didst divide the sea by thy strength;
Thou didst break the heads of the dragons on the
waters, Thou didst crush the heads of Leviathan (Ps 7413-14).
The prophet, recognizing that myth has become history in the Exodus,
plays to God to grant a new Exodus, which shall also be a new victory
for the Kingdom of God.
Awake, awake, put on strength, O arm of the Lord,
Awake as in days of old the generations of long ago.
Art than not he who cut Rahab in pieces, who pierced the dragon?
Art thou not he who dried up the sea, the waters of the great deep,
That didst make the depths of the sea a way for the redeemed to pass
over (Is 519‑10).
By such imagery Israel expressed her belief that her national history
was the scene in which God continued to wage His battle against the
powers of darkness, until the final victory should be won. ‘In that day
the Lord with his hard and great and strong sword will punish Leviathan
the fleeing serpent, Leviathan the twisting serpent, and he will slay
the dragon that is in the sea’ (Is 271). Incidentally this
theological belief had its effect on the form of the Exodus saga itself.
The picture of Israel marching through the sea between two solid walls
of water does not belong to the oldest strand of narrative, but is a
result of the late retelling of the story under
the influence of the cosmic myth.
Yet another important development of cosmology is to be found in the
story of the Flood. According to the Priestly account the Flood, which
was God's judgement on human evil, was brought about because
‘all the fountains of the great deep' burst and the windows of
heaven were opened’; i.e. God reversed the process of Creation and
allowed the waters above and the waters below to join forces again in a
second chaos. This has a bearing on the mythical presentation of the
Exodus, since the same sea which symbolized the forces of evil, barring
Israel's way to redemption and the promised land, was used by God in an
act of judgment on the pursuing Egyptians. It has a bearing also on the
imagery of Revelation. For John seas the martyr throng, their passage to
heaven barred by the sea of glass, the cosmic reservoir of evil out of
which the Monster had come. Then, in the last great Exodus of martyrdom,
they triumphantly cross the sea and 'sing the song of Moses, the servant
of God, and the song of the Lamb'. Finally, the sea of glass, like the
Egyptian sea, is poured from the bowls of God’s wrath to engulf the
city, whose allegorical name is Egypt (15‑16).
It is from the same cosmic myth that John draws
his Picture of the seven‑headed
Dragon who gives his power to the
seven‑headed Monster. The Canaanite creation myth speaks of the primeval
ocean as Lotan (Leviathan) the seven‑headed monster. As with other
mythology, this myth had been given historical application. Ezekiel had
addressed Pharaoh as ‘the great dragon lying in the midst of his
streams’ (298).
Daniel had portrayed under the figure of grim beasts the empires under
whose tyranny Israel had suffered. John is heir to all this Old
Testament imagery, yet he uses it with a creative independence. For he
distinguishes between the Dragon, whom he identifies with the
Tempter‑serpent of
Eden, and the Monster,
who is the last and most complete
historical embodiment of God's ancient enemy.
In the Canaanite mythology, as elsewhere in the
ancient world, one form of the creation myth has it that the world was
brought into being by a divine act of procreation by male and female
deities. With this myth were associated fertility rites which certainly
included sacred prostitution. When Israel entered Canaan and learnt
agriculture from the inhabitants, she was exposed to the seduction of
these cults and at times undoubtedly succumbed; so that, when she
eventually fought free of them, she still retained much of their
imagery. Israel was the bride of Yahweh, whom be had espoused in the
wilderness, and every dalliance with paganism was fornication.
In the Book of Proverbs, Wisdom is
represented as the perfect hostess, the patroness of all gracious
living, who pleads with the young man to regale himself in her salon and
not to join the dissipation of the bawdy‑house kept by Folly.
It has been plausibly suggested that the
personification of Wisdom was a deliberate attempt to offset the
seductions of
the
other Mother Goddess, whose pervasive
influence must have been a source of anxiety to every Jewish community
of the Dispersion, and especially to those in Egypt. John, then, was
using an image of great depth and power when he portrayed the unholy
city as the Great Harlot, who seduces all
nations to the worship of that which is not God.
III
Having traced three of John's images to their
mythological origin, we must now return to our starting point, that John
uses this imagery to give a theological comment on the current political
situation. The emperor Domitian is demanding that all his subjects
worship him as
Lord and God, and to
refuse this demonstration of loyalty would
maiestas,
treason for which the penalty was death. This demand, the climax of a
century or more of emperor‑worship, was what made John think of Rome as
the ultimate manifestation of the seven‑headed Monster and the Scarlet
Woman. The coming persecution would see a great sifting of men before
the judgment seat of God in which the dwellers of tile earth who bore
the mark of the Monster would 'be separated 'from the conquerors who
bore the seal of the Lamb. But why did John suppose that the whole world
worshipped the Monster and submitted, to the seductions of the Harlot?
It is at this point that John displays his mastery
over the traditional symbols he has inherited. In a chapter of moving
dignity he depicts the fall of Babylon and the world‑wide sorrow that
ensues. This was the city whose legions controlled the Mediterranean but
her mercantile empire stretched to the ends of the known world. From the
western islands, from the
shares of the Baltic and the Black Sea, from the coasts of Africa and
Arabia, from the plains of India and China, came the luxury goods to
pamper the imperial city, and the merchants of the world had
grown rich with her trade. This, according to John, was the real
secret that lay behind the Monster's worship and the Harlot's
allurements, and how accurate his diagnosis was!
Before the establishment of the Roman Empire men had prayed in
vain to a whole pantheon of
gods to give them freedom from want and
freedom from war, and what
the gods had denied Rome had given. Augustus had created the Pax
Romana and had given the world a prosperity such as it
had never before dreamed of, and his subjects
celebrated his birthday as ‘the birthday of the God and Saviour of the
whole human race’. We can cannot read Rev. 18 without sensing that John
himself appreciated the grandeur that was Rome and shared something of
the general dismay at the thought of her ruin. But he saw that the very
materialism which made her the object of the world's worship and the
persecutor of those who obstinately persisted in believing that man does
not live by bread alone would in the end be her own undoing.
John wrote a tract for his own times and his symbols
are properly regarded as the counterpart of first-century people and
events. But just because he pictured the crisis of his own time in the
archetypal symbols of myth and infused into the old myths the vitality
of his own creative imagination, his work has been found relevant to
similar crises in later ages, whenever men have felt themselves
confronted by a recrudescence of the mystery of iniquity and have felt
themselves called to that sacrificial obedience, by which alone God has
chosen to win His victories.
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