Revelation: Interpretation: A Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching

Revelation

INTERPRETATION

A Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching

INTERPRETATION

A BIBLE COMMENTARY FOR TEACHING AND PREACHING

James Luther Mays, Editor

Patrick D. Miller Jr., Old Testament Editor

Paul J. Achtemeier, New Testament Editor

M. EUGENE BORING

Revelation

To Fred, Clark, Leo, Ken

© 2011 Westminster John Knox Press

2011 paperback edition

Originally published in hardback in the United States by Westminster John Knox Press in 1989.

Louisville, Kentucky

11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20—10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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Unless otherwise indicated Scripture quotations are from the Revised Standard Version of the Holy Bible, copyright © 1946, 1952, 1971, and 1973 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A., and are used by permission.

Scripture quotations marked NEB are from The New English Bible, © The Delegates of the Oxford University Press and The Syndics of the Cambridge University Press, 1961, 1970. Used by permission.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Boring, M. Eugene.

Revelation / M. Eugene Boring

p. cm. — (Interpretation, a Bible commentary for teaching and preaching)

Bibliography: p.

ISBN-13: 978-0-8042-3150-3

ISBN-10: 0-8042-3150-8

1. Bible. N.T. Revelation—Commentaries. I. Series.

BS2825.3.B574 1989

228'.07—dc19

89–1829

ISBN: 978-0-664-23628-1 (paper edition)

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992

SERIES PREFACE

This series of commentaries offers an interpretation of the books of the Bible. It is designed to meet the need of students, teachers, ministers, and priests for a contemporary expository commentary. These volumes will not replace the historical critical commentary or homiletical aids to preaching. The purpose of this series is rather to provide a third kind of resource, a commentary which presents the integrated result of historical and theological work with the biblical text.

An interpretation in the full sense of the term involves a text, an interpreter, and someone for whom the interpretation is made. Here, the text is what stands written in the Bible in its full identity as literature from the time of the prophets and apostles, the literature which is read to inform, inspire, and guide the life of faith. The interpreters are scholars who seek to create an interpretation which is both faithful to the text and useful to the church. The series is written for those who teach, preach, and study the Bible in the community of faith.

The comment generally takes the form of expository essays. It is planned and written in the light of the needs and questions which arise in the use of the Bible as Holy Scripture. The insights and results of contemporary scholarly research are used for the sake of the exposition. The commentators write as exegetes and theologians. The task which they undertake is both to deal with what the texts say and to discern their meaning for faith and life. The exposition is the unified work of one interpreter.

The text on which the comment is based is the Revised Standard Version of the Bible. The general availability of this translation makes the printing of a translation unnecessary and saves the space for comment. The text is divided into sections appropriate to the particular book; comment deals with passages as a whole, rather than proceeding word by word, or verse by verse.

Writers have planned their volumes in light of the requirements set by the exposition of the book assigned to them. Biblical books differ in character, content, and arrangement. They also differ in the way they have been and are used in the liturgy, thought, and devotion of the church. The distinctiveness and use of particular books have been taken into account in decisions about the approach, emphasis, and use of space in the commentaries. The goal has been to allow writers to develop the format which provides for the best presentation of their interpretation.

The result, writers and editors hope, is a commentary which both explains and applies, an interpretation which deals with both the meaning and the significance of biblical texts. Each commentary reflects, of course, the writer’s own approach and perception of the church and world. It could and should not be otherwise. Every interpretation of any kind is individual in that sense; it is one reading of the text. But all who work at the interpretation of Scripture in the church need the help and stimulation of a colleague’s reading and understanding of the text. If these volumes serve and encourage interpretation in that way, their preparation and publication will realize their purpose.

The Editors

PREFACE

Revelation was designed to be read aloud and heard all at once, in the context of worship (see on 1:3). This is not optional; the Apocalypse must be grasped as a whole, for it simply cannot be understood verse by verse. It is a narrative, a drama with action and movement that conveys the message of each part within the context of the story in its totality.

Like Revelation, this commentary is written to be read and understood as a single document. Just as one cannot understand Revelation by examining isolated verses, this commentary cannot be used as a reference book in which individual items are looked up without reference to the whole. In responsible preaching and teaching from the Bible, there can be no quick homiletical fixes, no Saturday night specials, no raiding of either the Bible or books about it for valuable but loosely attached items that may be converted into a quick profit.

This is the reason for the extensive introduction, and for the lengthy excursuses (Reflections). This is why sizable sections of Revelation that deal with similar materials, such as the seven messages of chapters 2–3 and the series of plagues portrayed by the seals, trumpets, and bowls, are dealt with as whole units rather than piecemeal. Sermons and lessons may certainly deal with smaller units, but preaching and teaching from any text in these larger units must be aware of how the unit as a whole is composed and functions theologically.

Revelation is so written that its major themes are interwoven, each appearing numerous times. A commentary cannot discuss each theme each time it appears. Some themes are gathered into Reflections, others are dealt with extensively the first or major time they appear. Thus the treatment of the earlier chapters requires proportionately more space. Preaching and teaching on other texts in which these themes appear cannot ignore the discussion of the same themes earlier in the commentary.

Inclusive language is an important issue that must neither be treated cavalierly nor be subjected to an ideology. After much soul-searching and discussion with colleagues of varying, mostly opposed, points of view, I have decided in this book to continue my present practice of being as inclusive as possible when dealing with human beings, but to retain the traditional biblical language for God, masculine-dominated as it is. I do not believe God is a male (or female) being; I believe that all our language about God is metaphorical. I believe that the language we use can create, express, and reinforce a mind-set that is damaging to persons; I wish in no way to perpetuate the oppression of women, linguistic or otherwise, that is communicated by the tradition of a patriarchal society. It is theologically important to preserve personal language for God. It is important to preserve traditional language for God, particularly in a document such as Revelation which functions by evocatively alluding to the language of the Hebrew Scriptures. These allusions must be recognizable in order to understand what is going on in Revelation. Child, for instance, often fails to communicate the richness of biblical meaning associated with son. This is a subject on which I am still working, but have not yet found a way to eliminate the predominantly male orientation of biblical language about God and preserve the meaning of biblical texts, and this is the chief business of a commentary—as it is of preaching and teaching from the Bible.

I complete this book with gratitude to the colleagues and students at the Graduate Seminary of Phillips University and at Texas Christian University with whom I have studied Revelation in numerous classes during the last twenty years. In particular, I am grateful to my colleagues Ronald B. Flowers of the Department of Religion-Studies and Joseph R. Jeter Jr. of Brite Divinity School for their careful reading of and responses to previous drafts of this book, to Editors of this series Paul J. Achtemeier and James Luther Mays for their encouragement and help along the way, as well as for finally accepting a manuscript considerably longer than they anticipated, and to Edward J. McMahon and Lana N. Byrd, whose competent and cheerful assistance in completing this project has been far beyond the line of duty. The volume is dedicated to Fred B. Craddock, W. Clark Gilpin, Leo G. Perdue, and Kenneth T. Lawrence, colleagues whose comradeship, personal and professional, has embodied that rare combination of wisdom expressed in Proverbs 18:24 and 27:17.

M. Eugene Boring

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

The Last Book of the Bible

A Pastoral Letter

Written to First-century Christians in Asia in Crisis

By a Christian Prophet

Outline of Revelation

In Apocalyptic Language and Imagery

Difficult to Understand

Can Be Understood

Worth the Effort to Understand

Its Influence in Religion, History, and Culture

Its Message for the Contemporary Church

COMMENTARY

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Introduction

How can thinking Christians who want to live faithfully and responsibly in our contemporary world hear the word of God in Revelation? The basic information one needs in order to read the Apocalypse with insight and appreciation can be concentrated into two simple sentences which represent the thesis of this commentary:

1. The last book of the Bible is a pastoral letter to Christians in Asia in the late first century who were confronted with a critical religiopolitical situation, from a Christian prophet who wrote in apocalyptic language and imagery.

2. Like the Bible in general, there is some difficulty in understanding Revelation, but it can and should be understood, for it has had enormous influence in religion, history, and culture and has an urgently needed message for the contemporary church.

These two sentences contain ten theses on understanding Revelation which we may now explore one at a time.

The Last Book of the Bible

Although the Bible is a library of books with a variety of theologies, the Bible as a whole is also and primarily one book with one story. In a helpful oversimplification, it can be seen as a narrative drama in five acts, with God as author, producer, director, and main character:

1. Creation (Genesis): God created all that is.

2. Covenant (Exodus—Malachi): When creation was spoiled by rebellious humanity, God created a people, Israel, to be his agents and witnesses and bearers of the promise of God’s salvation to come.

3. Christ (Matthew—John): God came himself, in the person of his Son the Messiah, to accomplish salvation and mediate reconciliation.

4. Church (Acts—Jude): God has continued Israel’s mission in the church by creating an inclusive community from all nations to be witnesses and agents of his saving act already accomplished for all people.

5. Consummation (Revelation): God will bring history to a worthy conclusion when the creation which de jure belongs to God’s kingdom will de facto become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ, and he shall reign for ever and ever (11:15).

In vivid, sometimes grotesque pictures of the future establishment of God’s just rule throughout the creation, including scenes of the last battle and the last judgment, the book of Revelation portrays the triumphant finale of this drama, and thus was appropriately placed by the church at the end of the canon as the last book of the Bible.

The inclusion of Revelation in the Christian Bible did not happen without a struggle. From the moment of its composition, Revelation has been a controversial writing. We should not suppose that everyone in the seven churches to which it was originally addressed accepted it as authentic Christian teaching, for these churches contained rival prophets and teachers who opposed John and his message (2:2, 6, 14–15, 20–23). The letter was, however, accepted by many Christians and within a few decades had achieved such a wide circulation that it was cited as authoritative Christian teaching by bishops and other Christian leaders, not only in its native Asia (Melito, Bishop of Sardis, 160–190, who wrote a commentary on it) but in Egypt (Clement of Alexandria, d. 215), North Africa (Tertullian, d. 220), Rome (Muratorian Canon), and South Gaul (Irenaeus, 177–202).

Yet questions and disputes arose. A second-century Christian leader named Montanus caused much excitement by teaching that the church had entered into the final age of the Spirit, and predicted that the End was near and the new Jerusalem would descend at the nearby town of Pepuza, in what is now Turkey. Since he and the sect that followed him drew support from Revelation for their views, Revelation fell into disrepute among mainline Christians—not the last time in church history that Revelation would be rejected because of its misuse by its false friends. The Alogi, an anti-Montanist group, refused to use Revelation on the basis that it contained errors in fact and had not been written by an apostle. Gaius, an influential presbyter of the Roman church, wrote (ca. 210) a manifesto declaring that Revelation had been written by the gnostic heretic Cerinthus. About 250 the Bishop of Alexandria, Dionysius, made a careful study of the language and grammar of Revelation and concluded that it could not have been written by the same author as the Gospel of John and that it was therefore not apostolic. His conclusion provided helpful support for those Alexandrian Christians who wanted to oppose the use of Revelation in the churches, on the basis that its literal interpretation, especially of the millennium, was a distortion of the spiritual nature of Christianity. Thus as late as the fourth century, when Eusebius (d. 340) classified the Christian literature purported to be Scripture into accepted, rejected, and disputed, Revelation was still classified as disputed. Cyril of Jerusalem (315–386) was even more negative, omitting it from the list of canonical books and forbidding its use publicly or privately.

Even after its official acceptance into the canon, many Christians have been hesitant to regard Revelation as a part of their Bible. Although Martin Luther included Revelation in his Bible, he denied it functional canonical status because, in his view, it was not theologically adequate. The Swiss reformer Ulrich Zwingli likewise refused to base Christian teaching on Revelation, pronouncing it no biblical book. John Calvin passed over it in silence in his biblical exposition, writing commentaries on twenty-six New Testament books. Rudolf Bultmann is only one example of those modern theologians who, even though they regard the New Testament as the normative witness to the meaning of the gospel for the church’s faith and life, relegate Revelation to the margin. To this day, Catholic and Protestant lectionaries have only minimal readings from Revelation, and the Greek Orthodox lectionary omits it altogether. On the other hand, Christian thinkers from Irenaeus and Augustine in the early centuries through Walter Rauschenbusch and Paul Minear in America and Bishops Hans Lilje and Eduard Lohse in Germany are among those who have found Revelation to measure up to its canonical role of providing direction and sustenance for the church’s life and mission, especially in extraordinary times.

This brief historical sketch documents two aspects of Revelation that are still very much with us and call for immediate attention.

1. Revelation was one of the relatively few documents from among the vast literary output of early Christianity that survived the canonical process and became Holy Scripture for the Christian community. This slow and deliberate process, from the point of view of faith, was a process in which the Spirit of God was effectively at work. This process placed Revelation among the small list of documents through which the Christian community expects to hear the word of God, and to which it listens for authentic Christian declarations of the meaning of salvation through Jesus Christ, for teaching on how to live according to the will of God, and for assurances regarding the fate of the earth and of ourselves.

2. Many Christians have, from the earliest days, been uncomfortable with this decision, or have simply rejected it in practice. These hesitations have not been based on petty or superficial objections; they represent serious and deep questioning as to whether Revelation can function in the church as a Christian book. The reservations of some have been based on the real dangers that have emerged when Revelation has been interpreted in foolish, sub-Christian or anti-Christian ways. Although every biblical book is subject to misinterpretation, no other part of the Bible has provided such a happy hunting ground for all sorts of bizarre and dangerous interpretations. Some people in practically every generation from John’s own to the present have understood Revelation to be predicting the last days of the world in their own time.

Yet it is not only how the book has been understood that has raised reservations about its acceptance and use as a Christian book. The thoughtful reader of the book also finds things that are difficult to integrate into faith in and discipleship to the Man for Others who taught and lived love, forgiveness, and reconciliation. In Revelation the evil city Babylon receives not forgiveness but double for all her sins (18:6). Martyrs cry out for vengeance (6:10). Those who receive the mark of the beast shall be tormented with fire and sulphur in the presence of the holy angels and in the presence of the Lamb (14:10). This is in contrast to Jesus’ own response to his persecutors (Luke 23:34), and to that of his followers (e.g., Acts 7:60). In Revelation violent scene after violent scene is perpetrated by God, the heavenly armies, and by Christ himself—not only against their enemies but against the cosmos (6:1–8; 8:7–9:21; 16:1–20). In contrast, the Jesus of the Gospels teaches people to turn the other cheek, to love their enemies, and to pray for their persecutors (Matt. 5:38–39, 44); and he embodied this teaching in his own life and death. In Revelation salvation sometimes seems to be on the basis of one’s own deeds rather than on the grace of God (the word grace does not occur in Revelation except in letter formulae).

These objections are real. Should not a book that is beset within and without with such dangers simply be left alone? No, it should not. Other reasons will be given below, but here it is sufficient to call attention to the fact of the canonical status of Revelation. Part of what it means to have a canon is that the Bible is not treated as a cafeteria from which we choose what appeals to our individualistic tastes; we accept it as a whole as the collective wisdom of the Spirit-guided community of faith.

A Pastoral Letter

We study Revelation because it is in our Bible. However, John did not write it as the last book of the Bible; it was a letter to Christians he knew and for whom he felt a pastoral responsibility. However, by letter we do not mean a private communication. The letter was not intended for private, silent reading but was written to be read aloud in the worship services of the churches of Asia (1:3). We should not picture the original readers as poring over the pages of the document in silent, individualistic contemplation or puzzlement but gathered in the community of praise and prayer, hearing the letter read forth by the worship leader. The imagery of Revelation, which sometimes seems bizarre to modern readers, is mostly taken from the tradition of images familiar to those who were accustomed to hearing the Bible read in the worship services of the ongoing People of God. In order to capture something of the original experience of the readers (who are more properly called hearer-readers), a contemporary congregation, class, or study group might be well advised to gather in a church sanctuary or other worship setting, sing a hymn of praise, join in prayer, and then listen to the Revelation as it is read forth in its entirety by a good reader. (It is not too long for this; it was written for precisely such a hearing!) Much that is contained in the Apocalypse is best perceived by the ear and the imagination, as the visions of Revelation unfold in the mind’s eye. Those who remember the great days of radio drama will immediately appreciate this, and others of our eye-oriented age dominated by television may be pleasantly surprised at the richness of their latent aural-imaginative perception.

Those who accepted the prophetic authority of John would have considered the message of the letter as something to be taken seriously, but they did not yet hear it as the last book of the Bible. They did not hear it as a book at all. (The Greek word translated book in 22:18 is biblion, which means simply document; we have specific instances of its use as a synonym for letter.) Although I have followed the convention of referring to Revelation as a book, this is generically a misleading designation, not only for Revelation but for all the real letters of the New Testament. Revelation is a book only in the same sense that the Letter to the Romans is a book of the Bible. Recognizing the correct genre of a document is vital for understanding it, so it is important to make a clear distinction between a book and a letter. The author of a book writes for a general readership, a public, which he or she does not know personally. A book is thus a public document. In a book the author is a particular person, but the readership is vague and unknown to the author and the other readers. A book may be addressed to a particular reading public, such as football fans or medical students, but it is not addressed to particular persons. The distinctive thing about the real letter as a communication form is that, in contrast to a book, both the author and the readers are particular persons. A real letter presupposes the particular features of the situation of the readers and addresses them specifically.

Why did the prophet John choose the letter form, so atypical for prophets, as the medium for communicating his message? John stands in the tradition of the Pauline churches and is influenced by the Pauline letter form and its use in worship. John expects his letter to be read forth to the assembled congregations (1:3), after which the worshipers will celebrate the Eucharist. There is thus a very specific connotation to the imagery of the messianic banquet throughout the book (cf. e.g., 3:20; 19:9). The concluding lines (22:6–21) form something of a transition to the eucharistic celebration, as does the conclusion of some of Paul’s letters (cf. I Cor. 16:21). John is affected by this traditional use of the letter form in the churches of Asia, but he chooses the letter form not so much in imitation of Paul as for the same reason as Paul: He has something important to say which he cannot say personally to the congregations because he is absent. As in the case of Paul, the