Lyle A.

Brecht 27-Nov-07
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UNDERSTANDING PROPHECY
IN THE BOOK OF REVELATION

Before we can speak productively about the use of prophecy in the Book of Revelation, we
must understand to what use this prophecy is to be put by John of Patmos. First, John is using
prophecy to make known (esemanen, Rev 1:1) the details of eschatology – the working out of
human history according to divine plan. John’s theology, thus, is founded on the providence of
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UNDERSTANDING PROPHECY
IN THE BOOK OF REVELATION

God, as revealed through the life, death, and resurrection of God’s only son, Christ Jesus.1 But,
the filter through which John is experiencing this divine providence is through apocalypsis: a
revelation that perceives that “(1) the present world order, regarded as both evil and
oppressive, is under the temporary control of Satan and his human accomplices, and (2) that
this present world order will be shortly destroyed by God and replaced by a new perfect order
corresponding to Eden before the fall.”2 Not only is the world as we know it coming to an end,
but the prophetic message of John’s Revelation is to imaginatively make known what this
coming reveals.

John paints word-pictures for the listener that points to his revelation. What John is making
known are the signs that the listener experiences as the end draws near.3 Instead of the myths
of the Roman empire and worship of the state-of-being of the dominant worldview determining
one’s experience, John is substituting signs that paint new ‘world-pictures’ to break-through; 4
to enable God/Christ, as sovereign, to decide on the real state-of-exception, the eschatological
in-breaking of the kingdom of God.5 In modern terminology, what the persecutors of the people

1“‘Providence’… has to do with seeing what is before one, looking out ahead. To believe in the
providence of God is to believe that not only our individual lives but also history as a whole is under the
sovereignty of One who is ‘looking out ahead,’ that Someone is in the driver’s seat of history…. ‘God is
guiding history to a final goal.’” See M. Eugene Boring, Revelation, Interpretation (Louisville, John Knox
Press), 35-6.
2 David E. Aune, Apocalypticism, Prophecy and Magic in Early Christianity (Tubingen: Mohr Siebeck,
2006), 4. John is making known to his readers a realized eschatology where “events properly belonging
to the end of the world are paradoxically experienced as present” (Aune, 1).
3Boring, 64. “In their present form the visions are literary compositions based on John’s visionary
experience, not merely descriptive reports of what he ‘actually’ saw and heard” (Boring, 27).
4 ‘World-picture,’ according to Ludwig Wittgenstein, might be thought of as a frame or framework
through which we look to discern what is real and what is not, and what is important, from our vantage
point. Ultimately, this looking creates a “picture” of the world that we use to decipher new data. New
data needs to “fit” this picture. It must ‘make sense’ within our world-picture. Otherwise, new data
(ideas, experiences, paradigms) are nonsense, even though they may be ‘real’ in a larger sense.
5Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception (Kevin Attell, trans.; Chicago & London: The University of Chicago
Press, 2005), 1-3. For John, like Saint Paul, the event of Jesus’ death and resurrection is the “cosmic
eschatological event that separated ‘this age’… from the ‘age to come.’ Thus, the state-of-exception as
defined by the empire has been replaced by a new time, that of God’s “salvific benefits of the age to
come” experienced in the present (Aune, 9-10).
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UNDERSTANDING PROPHECY
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of God, and those who refuse God/the Christ as their sovereign experience is ‘blowback’ – the
unimagined and unexpected consequences of their own actions; actions the dominant ruling-
class of the day rationalized as Oderint dum metuant (“Let them hate us so long as they fear
us” – a slogan of Roman leaders from Cato to Caesar).6 Essentially, John’s world-pictures of
the End calls for a re-examination of the prevailing ethical system of the Empire7 that ‘pledges
allegiance to the flag and all it stands for’ and moves towards a “healing of the world, known in
Hebraic theology as tikkun olam.” 8 For, to John, that is what the purpose of the End is – to heal
the world – God’s created order.9 Secondly, which brings us to the real purpose of John’s
prophecy that is to make known, “what kind of God is God?” exactly as many of the narrative

6 Thomas Jefferson is quoted as saying “when the government fears the people, there is liberty; when
the people fear the government, there is tyranny.” See Chalmers Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire:
Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (New York: Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt & Co.,
2004), 285, 298. This was picked up recently in the movie, V for Vendetta, a modern retelling of the
Apocalypse and the end-time brought on by blowback and misplaced sovereignty.
7For twenty-first century North Americans, the equivalency of ‘Empire’ as envisioned by John in his
Revelation is not necessarily a politically-defined place as much as a politically-determined, dominant
world-view that imagines a world where: (1) the individual is autonomous and is self-authorized to
pursue individual well-being, security, and happiness entirely as he/she so chooses; (2) where one of the
primary ways of pursing well-being, security, and happiness is by consuming resources without restraint
or limit, subject to individual wealth, even at the expense of others in one’s community, and (3) a world
where it takes force, coercion, and/or violence to enjoy and protect the community of individuals
exercising their freely chosen well-being, security, and happiness, and such force can rightfully be
exerted without consideration as to the consequences to other communities. See Walter Brueggemann,
Theology of the Old Testament: Testimony, Dispute, Advocacy (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1997), 718.
8Barbara Miller, Tell It On the Mountain: The Daughter of Jephthah in Judges II, Interfaces (Barbara
Grundy, ed.; Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2005), 53.
9 John’s vision and prophecy are ultimately ethical in nature, much like many biblical stories where the
“emphasis is not the development of moral qualities by following the example of biblical characters, but
rather the growth of ethical perception which is produced as a result of entering into” the narrative world
the biblical author has created for the listener to imagine him/herself inhabiting. See Athena E. Garospe,
Narrative and Identity: An Ethical Reading of Exodus 4 (Leiden & Boston: Brill, 2007), 5.
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stories in Scripture attempt to do.10 But, for John, much like for St. Paul, he is describing ‘what
kind of God is God?’ from the perspective of messianic time: “the time that time takes to come
to an end…the time that is left us (il tempo che ci resta)” which is actually ho nyn Kairos (“the
time of the now”).11 What John is making known for the reader through his imaginative world-
pictures is a revelation of a space-time that has escaped the day-to-day powers and
principalities of the prevailing empire and ushers in a totally new world-of-being defined by the
“messianic promise of justice.” 12

Thirdly, John’s prophecy functions to remind the listener of his Revelation that “The present is
shaped not just by the past but by God’s future. John affirms that by being given a future we
are given a present, and he has incorporated this conviction” – his prophesy – into the images
he is painting through his Revelation for his listeners.13 John is not predicting the future or a
future, as it will be in detail either from a first century CE or twenty-first century perspective; he
is using signs to prophesy how those who turn to God/Jesus the Christ as their sovereign in
any age can experience the present.14 In discussing the opening paragraph in Ephesians,
Rowan Williams essentially sums-up John’s prophecy to the seven churches in Revelation
succinctly as “This and this alone is God’s ‘agenda:’ the world he has made is designed to

10The question for interpreting Scripture is “What was God saying to Israel (us, at that time) through
Moses or through Jeremiah, or through the apostles? To read the Bible as ‘Bible prophecy’ directly for
our time, or to read it as a kind of Bible code, is to abuse it and to denigrate the experience of the
prophets and the apostles and their struggles in their time.” See James A. Sanders, Torah and Canon,
2nd ed. (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2005), 89, 124.
11 Giorgio Agamben, The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans (Patricia Daily,
trans.; Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 61, 67-8. In Revelation, see 1:1; 1:3; 2:16; 2:25; 3:1;
3:20; 6:11; 10:6; 11:2-3; 12:6; 12:12; 17:10; 22:6; 22:7; 22:10; 22:12; 22:20 (Boring, 69-70).
12Slavoj Zizek, The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
2003), 139. For Christians, the standard view of Jewish messianic justice or even justice as defined by
the Roman empire “has been redefined by the cross of Jesus” (Boring, 111).
13 Boring, 33. “Prophets were not predictors of historical events of the distant future but were inspired
interpreters of the historical events through which their hearers were living” (Boring, 25).
14 As Reinhold Niebuhr reminds us: “It is unwise for Christians to claim any knowledge of either the
furniture of heaven or the temperature of hell, or to be to certain about any details of the kingdom of God
in which history is consummated.” See Reinhold Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man, vol. 2: Human
Destiny (New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1964), 294 quoted in Ben Witherington III, Revelation (New
Cambridge Bible Commentary; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 284.
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UNDERSTANDING PROPHECY
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become a reconciled world, a world in which diverse human communities come to share a life
together because they share the conviction that God has acted to set them free from fear and
guilt…. This reconciliation liberates human voices for praise, for celebrating the glory of God
who has made it possible and has held steadily to his purpose from the beginning. This is what
God is after, and there is no hidden agenda, nothing is kept back.” 15

For John, “worship [of God/Christ] unites heaven and earth…. worship breaks down all
boundaries…. worship establishes what is true, what is real.”16 This is the true nature of John’s
prophetic signs in Revelation, not some detailed prediction of pre-millennial or dispensational
events to come. John is attempting through his Revelation to make known real, useful, and
timely information to his audience in the seven churches that are exhibiting a ‘pervasive moral
and political paralysis.’ His prophecy is ultimately signifying the radical “declaration of trust in
God,” recorded by the Psalmist that:

Though my father and mother forsook me,

The Lord would gather me in (Ps. 27:10, trans. Robert Alter).17

15 Rowan Williams, Tokens of Trust: An Introduction to Christian Belief (Louisville: Westminster John Knox
Press, 2007), 8-9. “John shares with Paul that at the end of the historical road God will be ‘all in
all’ (panta en pasin, RSV ‘everything to everyone,’ I Cor 15:28)” [Boring, 215].
16Wilfred J. Harrington, O.P., Revelation (Sacra Pagina; Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1993), 30. See
especially Rev 5:8-14 where the final chorus sings “in praise to the Lamb is comprised of the whole
creation” (Boring, 111).
17 Robert Alter considers that the “extravagance of this declaration of trust in God, perhaps the most
extreme in the whole Bible [he is talking about the Hebrew Bible], is breathtaking and perhaps even
disturbing.” See Robert Alter, The Book of Psalms: A Translation with Commentary (New York & London:
W.W. Norton & Company, 2007), 93.