Hearing John's Voice: Insights for Teaching and Preaching

Hearing John’s Voice

Insights for Teaching and Preaching

M. Eugene Boring

WILLIAM B. EERDMANS PUBLISHING COMPANY

GRAND RAPIDS, MICHIGAN

Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.

4035 Park East Court SE, Grand Rapids, Michigan 49546

www.eerdmans.com

© 2019 M. Eugene Boring

All rights reserved

Published 2019

25 24 23 22 21 20 191 2 3 4 5 6 7

ISBN 978-0-8028-7546-4

eISBN 978-1-4674-5637-1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Boring, M. Eugene, author.

Title: Hearing John’s voice : insights for teaching and preaching / M. Eugene Boring.

Description: Grand Rapids : Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019021026 | ISBN 9780802875464 (pbk. : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Bible. John—Criticism, interpretation, etc. | Bible. Epistles of John—Criticism, interpretation, etc. | Bible. Revelation—Criticism, interpretation, etc.

Classification: LCC BS2601 .B67 2019 | DDC 226.5/06—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019021026

Faith by Patrick Overton is reprinted by permission of the author.

Prayers and confessions

of those who interpret the Scriptures

for the people of God

אֲדֹנָי יְהוִֹה נָתַן לִי לְשׁוֹן לִמּוּדִים

לָדַעַת לָעוּת אֶת־יָעֵף דָּבָר

יָעִיר בַּבֹּקֶר בַּבֹּקֶר

יָעִיר לִי אֹזֶן לִשְׁמֹעַ כַּלִּמּוּדִים׃

The Lord GOD has given me the tongue of a teacher,

that I may know how to sustain the weary with a word.

Morning by morning he wakens—

wakens my ear to listen as those who are taught.

—Isaiah 50:4, an interpreter of the prophet

Πολλοὶ οὖν ἀκούσαντες ἐκ τῶν µαθητῶν αὐτοῦ εἶπαν·

σκληρός ἐστιν ὁ λόγος οὗτος· τίς δύναται αὐτοῦ ἀκούειν;

Many therefore of his disciples,

when they had heard this, said,

This is an hard saying; who can hear it?

—John 6:60 KJV, an interpreter of Jesus

προσευχόµενοι ἅµα καὶ περὶ ἡµῶν,

ἵνα ὁ θεὸς ἀνοίξῃ ἡµῖν θύραν τοῦ λόγου

λαλῆσαι τὸ µυστήριον τοῦ Χριστοῦ . . .

ἵνα φανερώσω αὐτὸ ὡς δεῖ µε λαλῆσαι

. . . pray for us also,

that God may open to us a door for the word,

to declare the mystery of Christ . . .

that I may make it clear, as I ought to speak.

—Colossians 4:3–4, an interpreter of the apostle

Contents

Foreword by Thomas G. Long

Preface

Prologue

1.Beginning at the End

Beginning with Revelation

Strange New World within the Bible

Revelation Is Prophecy and Theology

Revelation, Reality, and the Power of Words

A Narrative World of Conflicting Imagery

Approaching Revelation, Getting into Apocalyptic

Revelation Is a Church Document

2.The Revelation of Jesus Christ and the One True God

Revelation 1—Christological Monotheism

Revelation 2–3—the Church of the Living God, Warts and All

Revelation 4–5—the Triune God: Mission Control of the Universe

Revelation 6–18—God the Righteous Judge: Violence, Divine and Human

Revelation 19–22—in the End, God: The New World Coming and Already Here

3.Tensions and Conflicts in the Beloved Community: The Johannine Letters

Pluralistic World

Fragmented Church

Disputed Christology

4.Retelling the Jesus Christ Story: Soundings in the Theology of the Gospel of John

A Brief Theological Introduction to the Gospel of John

John’s Introduction: Prologue and Testimony (1:1–18)

Book One, the Triumphal Entry and Presence: The Incarnate Word Confronts the World (1:19–12:50)

Book Two, the Triumphal Departure and Return: Farewell Instruction for Those Left Behind (13:1–21:25)

Epilogue

Notes

Bibliography

Index of Names and Subjects

Index of Scripture and Other Ancient Sources

Foreword

In a sermon preached many years ago, William Sloane Coffin related how, as a boy, he would often go out after a rainstorm to engage in puddle-gazing. He marveled, he said, at how small bodies of water could reflect so much of the sky and earth. Today, he continued, I still marvel at how so much of the story of heaven and earth can be captured in small, Biblical stories.¹

M. Eugene Boring’s focus in this volume is the Johannine corpus—Revelation, 1–3 John, and the Gospel of John—no mere puddle, of course, but a small bay, perhaps, in the great sea of the New Testament. Even so, when Boring gazes into this literature, he sees the reflection of something even larger, the vastness of the Christian faith. Providence, Christology, the work of the Holy Spirit, eschatology, the church, the rhythms of the Christian life—all of these themes and more can be found in this small collection of late first- and early second-century documents addressed to a cluster of churches in the Roman province of Asia and gathered around the traditions of the Beloved Disciple.

Boring wants to hear the uniqueness of John’s voice and wants his readers to hear it, too. He desires to discern the distinctive vocabulary and emphases of the Johannine world, but even as he does, he affirms that John’s fundamental worldview is more like than unlike the rest of the New Testament. Even the strangest of the Johannine documents, Revelation, with its bizarre apocalyptic imagery and its insistent dualism, is finally not a departure from the rest of the New Testament but instead an intensification of its core message. "Revelation, Boring writes, is a whole lot of what all the New Testament is some of. "

By understanding the Johannine corpus this way, Boring manages to honor its exceptional qualities, its vividness, even its idiosyncrasies and strangeness, while at the same time locking the exits against those who might wish to flee to the seemingly safer regions of Paul and Jesus. Indeed, the apocalyptic demand of John’s voice helps us to see anew the apocalyptic themes in the Gospels and Paul and to understand that they are neither ornamental nor dispensable, but essential.

For those readers whose first exposure to New Testament scholarship came from one of the standard New Testament introductory textbooks, there may be a surprise here. Boring builds this book in reverse. Instead of moving from the Gospel of John to the letters of John to Revelation, he travels from Revelation through the letters to the Gospel. He is guided here not by canonical order, or even strictly by chronology, but by theology. The Christian life is lived, by those marching through the middle of things, out of a vision of the end of all things.

Indeed, the book of Revelation is a disclosure, an apocalypse, literally a revelation, of the end of all things, of the destination toward which we are traveling. By being a disclosure of what shall surely be, it is also an illumination of how things truly are now. It is this unveiling of the deepest truths, the most profound meanings, and the ultimate destination of human life and history that makes the human journey matter. All human beings are moving toward some dimly perceived telos. It is only when we discover, as Paul Ricoeur helped us to do, that this telos is actually calling to us, summoning us forward toward the end of all things, that the wandering journey is transformed into a holy pilgrimage.

Boring writes from his position as a seasoned, judicious biblical scholar, and he writes for churchly teachers and preachers. He writes for teachers by first of all being a marvelous one himself. With a steady hand, he guides the reader through the complex labyrinth of the Johannine worldview, patiently teaching the terms, issues, claims, cultural resources, and doctrines that define this matrix. We who read are enabled to hear John’s voice and also to understand John’s mind.

Boring writes for preachers in so many ways, and none stronger than his conviction about the power of language. He is convinced, for example, that the best experience of the world of Revelation is not in art or literature but rather in sound, to hear it read in toto by a good reader in a service of Christian worship. He knows that the sound of John’s voice, spoken so many centuries ago, remains most alive not in commentaries or in ecclesiastical art but in sermonic sound, in the act of preaching faithfully on these texts. For every shaky preacher who has doubted the power of preaching and who has been tempted to forsake the pulpit in favor of a self-help program, a video clip, a leadership gimmick, or something else that might be more effective than a spoken sermon, Boring has a hopeful conviction he acquired from John himself: "Sometimes a word is worth a thousand pictures."

Like the book of Revelation, this book, too, ends with a promise. In this case, it is Boring’s welcome promise that the same attention he has turned toward the churches of the Beloved Disciple he will give, in a separate volume, to the churches of Paul. We who are the grateful readers of this volume will undoubtedly respond with words reminiscent of the ending of Revelation itself: Come quickly!

THOMAS G. LONG

Bandy Professor Emeritus of Preaching

Candler School of Theology

Emory University

Atlanta, Georgia

Preface

This book is written for preachers and teachers in the church. The constant goal is to approach within hearing distance of the Bible’s own message. The following pages aim to encourage and facilitate drinking directly from the generative springs from which biblical theology emerges, wading in them, even submerging and perhaps being overwhelmed by them. These pages do not attempt to survey all biblical theology, not even all Johannine theology or texts, but offer probes and soundings that hopefully both facilitate and illustrate serious, in-depth engagement with the Bible, with ears always open to being taught from the Scriptures, with eyes on communication of its manifold message in Christian proclamation and instruction.

My thanks to the capable Eerdmans editorial staff for encouraging and helping to shape this project, especially to Trevor Thompson and James Ernest, who convinced me that my earlier and larger manuscript should become an informal, open-ended series, of which this is the initial volume.

My deepest gratitude goes to a rather large group of preachers and teachers, most of whom do not know each other, but who have read and responded to various parts and stages of this developing project. The group includes congregational pastors and teachers, college and seminary professors of Bible and homiletics, denominational executives, clergy and laypersons, representing several denominations. They have responded by email and met with me in groups and one-on-one. They sometimes disagree with each other and with me. They have been my students and teachers. All are active members of congregations; virtually all preach and/or teach regularly in congregations. The common denominator is commitment to the church and the desire to be vehicles of the Verbum Dei through which the church is called into being and nourished for its witness and mission in the world. I am profoundly grateful to each of them. I especially appreciate the counsel of Thomas G. Long during the formative stages of this project and the foreword he has contributed to this volume. I dedicate this book to this group of colleagues, brothers and sisters in ministry, and to all faithful preachers and teachers who continue to nourish the church in the biblical faith:

David Artman, Bobby Cook, Miles Cook, Charlotte Coyle, Jerry Coyle, Bryan Feille, Laurie Feille, Jeff Gehle, Kim Hames, Thomas G. Long, Andy Mangum, Roger McMurry, Sammie Maxwell, Lance Pape, Ryan Pfeiffer, Russell Pregeant, Jim L. Robinson, Walter Rogero, Irwin Sentilles, Dawn Weaks, Newell Williams, Raymond B. Williams, Christopher Wilson

M. EUGENE BORING

Fort Worth, Texas

July 18, 2019

Prologue

Two travelers walk along the road together, engaged in serious and friendly conversation. It’s a familiar road. We know it well. On this road there is no stopping, no turning back. We can remember some of the road behind us, with its joys, sorrows, and things we might do differently now, but there are no do-overs, no Undo command. Even if we try to stop, the road itself, an ever-flowing stream, moves relentlessly on. Even if we think we remain the same, our world is different every day, leaving yesterday behind and moving on to who-knows-where. It’s a one-way road; we meet no oncoming traffic, no one who has been there and back.

This is just the way the road is, and it does not interfere with the conversation between the two travelers, which is about where the road leads. One believes the road leads nowhere; it either goes on forever or gradually becomes smaller and less distinct and then fizzles out into nothingness. Fade to black.

The other believes the road leads to the City of God.

There are other people on the road. A lot of them. Some are like us; they speak the same language, call the same country their home. Others are different. It is sometimes scary, and we tend to huddle together with those who are like us.

The conversation repeatedly returns to the main question: Where does the road go? Some people on the road say, I don’t know where the road is going, don’t think anybody knows, haven’t thought about it much. Some say, I know where I am going. When my body dies, the road may go on and on, but my soul goes to heaven.

But that’s not the question. It’s not about me; it’s about the road, the world, and all those other people. If we knew where the road and the world itself are headed, we might do some things differently, might even see the bad things that happen along the road in a different light. If the road is actually going someplace, are we all going to the same place, or does it finally divide—some to the right, some to the left? Is there only one road, or are different groups of people on different roads? Are there interchanges, or are we stuck on the road we’re on?

All along the road, the two travelers experience the same things, a mixture of good and evil. They have different attitudes, different feelings, about the trip itself. The difference between them is a matter of faith. Not that one has faith and the other does not; each has his or her faith. The one who believes the road leads to the City of God did not figure this out on her own, nor is it a matter of wishful thinking. She believes that the goal and meaning of the road have been revealed. Not that she has had some personal revelatory experience, but she belongs to a community of pilgrims on the road who believe that the creator has revealed the ultimate goal and meaning of things, including our own little lives.

Neither, of course, can prove his or her view about the road. But the two can’t resolve their differences by agreeing that, after all, it’s just the way they feel about it—that each should respect other people’s opinions, but no one should claim that his or her view is really true. Though the world is sufficiently ambiguous to be interpreted theistically or atheistically, at the last turn of the road one of them will turn out to be right about the objective reality, and to have been right all along. Their conversation is not about their feelings but about truth.¹

Chapter 1

Beginning at the End

Some of us preachers and teachers in the church might suppose that those who hear us on Sunday mornings, or even we ourselves, don’t have conversations about the meaning of life, what it’s all about, where it’s all going, and all that. And why should we? Why not just live in the now, enjoying the trip? Or is such talk dangerous self-deception?

Human beings seem to be hardwired to ask ultimate questions, aware that we live from the future. We don’t need a biblical revelation to know that our life always stretches out ahead of us. Not only biblical prophets and sages but also personal experience, psychologists, and social scientists insist that life as such always resides on the moving line between memory and hope. Whoever has no memory has no identity; whoever has nothing to look forward to has no present either. To be given a future is to be given a present. We always live prospectively but interpret retrospectively, seeing the significance of the present only in the later light of the end. But how can anyone know where the road is going?

God the creator has made everything suitable for its time; moreover he has put a sense of past and future into their minds, yet they cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end.

—Ecclesiastes 3:11 NRSV

In order to have a sense of who we are, we have to have a notion of how we have become, and of where we are going.

—Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self:

The Making of the Modern Identity

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 47

One of the embarrassing things about being a human being is that—despite our self-centered desire or claim to be in control—getting a glimpse of what my life is all about requires our seeing it in its context on the road we travel with all other human beings, and also requires some idea of where the road is finally going. But only God sees the whole picture, the end from the beginning. God is the one who says,

I am God, and there is no other;

I am God, and there is no one like me,

declaring the end from the beginning

and from ancient times things not yet done,

saying, "My purpose shall stand,

and I will fulfill my intention." (Isa 46:9–10)¹

Seeing the future requires a revelation from God. We are speaking, of course, not of the particulars of the historical future, as foretold by fortune-tellers and interpreters of biblical prophecy, but of the Ultimate Future. Where is everything going?

The issue turns out to be: Has there been a revelation, or are we on our own?

The Christian faith, as confessed by the church through the centuries and around the world and as documented in the New Testament from its first book to its last, claims that our understanding of who we are, where we are going, the meaning of our fleeting lives, and the meaning of the road itself is not something some of us may have figured out but is something that has been revealed. For Christian faith, God’s definitive revelation is in Jesus Christ. This is not something we have worked out on our own, as though we observed what Jesus said and did and decided, on the basis of sound common sense, that he must be a revelation from God. Some examples:

Matthew 16:15–17: "He said to them, ‘But who do you say that I am?’ Simon Peter answered, ‘You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.’ And Jesus answered him, ‘Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah! For flesh and blood has not revealed (apokalyptō) this to you, but my Father in heaven.’ " Other people, many of them sincere seekers, looked Jesus over, checked him out by their criteria, decided he was a threat to law and order and to sound religion, and took the appropriate action.

Matthew 11:25–27: "At that time Jesus said, ‘I praise you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and learned, and revealed (apokalyptō) them to little children (NIV; NAB childlike, CEV ordinary people). . . . All things have been committed to me by my Father. No one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and those to whom the Son chooses to reveal (apokalyptō) him.’ "

Romans 16:25–26: "Now to God who is able to strengthen you according to my gospel and the proclamation of Jesus Christ, according to the revelation (apokalypsis) of the mystery that was kept secret for long ages but is now disclosed, and through the prophetic writings made known to [us] . . ."

1 Corinthians 2:9–10: "But, as it is written, ‘What no eye has seen, nor ear heard, / nor the human heart conceived, / what God has prepared for those who love him’—these things God has revealed (apokalyptō) to us through the Spirit."

Galatians 1:11–12: "For I want you to know, brothers and sisters, that the gospel that was proclaimed by me is not of human origin; for I did not receive it from a human source, nor was I taught it, but I received it through a revelation (apokalypsis) of Jesus Christ."

Beginning with Revelation

The New Testament book with the most explicit claim to be a revelation from God has the word revelation (apocalypse) as its first word. Every New Testament book makes this claim implicitly, but it is unavoidable in Revelation, uncomfortably so. We preachers and teachers of the church might thus begin our soundings into biblical theology with the last book of the Christian Bible. This is not necessarily because we will be preaching a lot of sermons from this strange book, nor because we must affirm its apocalyptic worldview as our own. It is because we must understand biblical texts in their own terms—coming within hearing distance—before we interpret them and integrate their message into our own theology. We begin with Revelation because it presents us with a number of crucial issues that face us throughout the New Testament. In other biblical books we may sometimes be unaware of them or able to avoid them, but if we seriously try to understand Revelation (as opposed to merely using the text for our own agenda), we face unavoidable hermeneutical problems. Other New Testament apocalyptic thinkers such as Matthew and Paul are also hard to interpret, but in them we might suppose that we can find texts more congenial to our purposes: in Matthew the Sermon on the Mount, in Paul 1 Corinthians 13 (rarely noticing that both are built on an apocalyptic foundation). It is obvious that to understand Revelation we must understand apocalyptic. This is true of the New Testament as a whole. In this regard, the difference between Revelation and other New Testament documents is in degree, not in kind. Again, a few examples:

In Matthew 19:28, Luke 22:30, and 1 Corinthians 6:2, the Jesus of Matthew and Luke—as well as Paul—utilizes the imagery of Christians and their leaders participating in the final judgment involving rebellious humans and angels. Revelation gives expansive elaboration of this imagery that is already found in Paul and the Gospels.

The powerfully weird imagery of Revelation 12–13, in which the dragon gives the beast from the sea its power (13:2, 4), is only an elaboration of the imagery presupposed in Luke 4:6, where it is Satan who gives the empire its power.

In Luke 10:18, Jesus sees Satan fall from heaven, and John 12:31–32 pictures the demonic ruler of the world cast out when Jesus is lifted up on the cross.

In Luke 12:5, Jesus speaks: But I will warn you whom to fear: fear him who, after he has killed, has authority to cast into hell. Yes, I tell you, fear him!

In Galatians 4:26, Paul refers in passing to the Jerusalem above; that is, he presupposes and only alludes to what Revelation elaborates.

Paul describes the church as the fiancée of Christ (2 Cor 11:2), but the bride of Christ in Revelation expands and repeatedly elaborates the image.

Paul promises that God will shortly crush Satan under the believers’ feet (Rom 16:20; cf. 16:25) but does not expand the image; Revelation fills in the picture already present in Romans.

In 1 Thessalonians 3:13, Jesus returns at the end of history with all his holy ones, a climactic concluding image elaborated in Revelation.

The imagery and vocabulary of the "wrath (orgē) of God," portrayed with frightening or repugnant intensity in Revelation, are common to New Testament theology. The Greek word orgē is found thirty-six times in the New Testament, mostly referencing the wrath of God or Jesus (e.g., Matt 3:7; Mark 3:5; Luke 21:23; John 3:36; Rom 1:18; 2:5, 8; 1 Thess 1:10; Heb 3:11).

We cannot escape apocalyptic by fleeing to Jesus or Paul. In the Gospels and Paul’s letters, such images can be passed over as incidental (though they are fundamental), but not in Revelation. If our preaching or teaching is based on texts we choose ourselves, in most New Testament books we can simply avoid those that seem too apocalyptic. If we preach from the lectionary, there will usually be something in one of the texts that strikes a responsive chord in our own agenda, something we can handle without getting involved in apocalyptic imagery and worldview. In Revelation, our self-constructed little world comes to an end, and there is no place to hide (Rev 6:12–17). Revelation is a whole lot of what all the New Testament is some of. To learn to hear the Christian gospel in its original apocalyptic context is to open up much else in the New Testament to more authentic interpretation. Come clean with Revelation, and we become more honest and capable interpreters of the rest of the New Testament, which will have a better chance of making its own message heard in our preaching and teaching.

Here we mention a few key topics, each explored in the following chapters and subsequent volumes in this series in ways more appropriate to each author’s own mode of communicating the faith.

Christology

The Messiah comes at the end. The world is in a mess, always has been, but the world is a story, and the story is not over. Jewish Scriptures and theology looked toward the future, the promise of God to make everything right at the end. The fundamental Christian confession is that the Christ has come, and he is the crucified and risen Jesus of Nazareth. This confession, whether or not dulled by familiarity, is strange: it involves the anointing (pouring olive oil on the head) of someone who, it is claimed, is prophet, priest, and king. Prophets do not announce their considered opinions but the Word of God; priests offer sacrifice, atone for sin, intercede for sinners; kings have absolute authority and call for obedience, take responsibility for justice and salvation, and make the laws, which they interpret and enforce. Faith in Jesus as the Messiah is inseparable from eschatology. We democratic moderns don’t like any of this. Some thoughtful Jews and Christians regard eschatology, especially its apocalyptic version, as either wishful thinking or nonthinking.

Revelation presents Jesus as the truly human one, who has already lived and died (been killed) on this earth. Hardly anything of the earthly life of Jesus is narrated in Revelation, but Jesus is proclaimed as the one who is united with us in the most human of all acts. He dies. Yet this human one, who stood before the Roman power and was faithful unto death, is not presented merely as a past hero to be remembered, whose ideals are to be followed by those who choose to take up his cause. He is the truly divine One who was present at the creation, who has been exalted to the transcendent world and shares the throne of God, and who continues to speak, to call the church into being through the Word of God, to call for faithfulness even to death. He is the one we will meet at the end of our own lives, and at the end of history. He is the one who not only came to earth; he is the one who is coming again.

Apocalypse

All that Revelation has to say is expressed in the imagery and thought world of apocalyptic (including the messages to the seven churches in chapters 2–3, sometimes thought to be less apocalyptic and more preachable). To understand Revelation, we must understand apocalyptic thought, with its bizarre imagery and the-end-is-coming-soon conviction. The early church, and the New Testament as a whole, grew out of a historical context permeated with apocalyptic thought, which it partially adopted, partially adapted and modified, partially rejected, but could not and did not ignore. This means that not only Revelation but also the New Testament in general will not be understood in its own terms unless heard as responding, in one way or another, to this apocalyptic thought world. In other New Testament books, it is possible to find preaching values and lessons for today without coming to terms with an apocalyptic worldview so different from our own, and to regard Revelation’s apocalypticism as marginal and dispensable. Actually, however, John’s fundamental worldview is more like than unlike the rest of the New Testament. Though it remains a disputed point among exegetes and historians, the view that apocalyptic is central to understanding the New Testament is by far the majority view of international New Testament scholarship. Whatever views Jesus himself may have held, whoever wants to understand the New Testament must be familiar with apocalyptic.

Violence, Power, and Judgment

Apocalyptic is a powerful and disturbing literary and theological genre. To read or hear an apocalyptic text such as Revelation all at once, to take its images, sounds, and smells seriously, is to be shaken, perhaps repulsed or even disgusted, by its intense, unrelenting violence. One wonders if this can be the same merciful God of Hosea, the same compassionate Christ of Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount. Although Hosea and Matthew have pictures of divine violence (e.g., Hos 5:8–14; Matt 24:37–50), in their books we can find a lot of other material more unproblematically preachable, providing more wiggle room for our personal preferences and homiletical imaginations. Not so in Revelation. But learn to deal honestly with Revelation, and we become more authentic interpreters of Hosea and Matthew.

Ecclesiology, Jews, and Christians

Again, the questions of the relation of the followers of Jesus to Judaism, then and now, are found throughout the New Testament. The church is pictured as the continuation of Israel, sometimes in ways that can be understood as claiming that the church is the new Israel, perhaps even Israel’s replacement. Harsh things are sometimes said about the Jews. This issue is intensified in Revelation, where Jews are called the synagogue of Satan and Christians are promised that someday Jews will come and grovel at Christian feet (Rev 2:9; 3:9). How should followers of Jesus today, New Testament in hand, understand the church? Can one love Jesus the Jew and disdain the church, which supposedly misunderstood and domesticated him? In Revelation, the church’s identity and self-understanding, and its relation to Jesus, Israel, and Judaism, are front and center. Revelation cannot be understood without grasping its ecclesiology. But this is true of the New Testament as a whole. Deal with it here, and countless New Testament texts appear in a new and more authentic light.

Strange New World within the Bible

To read the book of Revelation—better, to hear it read in toto by a good reader in a service of Christian worship—is to enter a new world. This is true of narratives in general, of course, and powerfully true of the Bible narrative as a whole, but it is inescapably, overwhelmingly, even painfully true in reading Revelation. The risen Christ appears, eyes of fiery flame, with trumpet voice like mighty waves crashing against the shore, holding seven stars in his right hand. A throne in the heavenly sky appears, the Almighty seated on the throne, the heavenly court—zoological and humanoid—singing eternal praise. A slaughtered Lamb receives a sealed book, opens it, and great terrors strike not only the earth with its fish, animals, and humans, good and evil alike, but also the solar system, the planets, and the stars. Seven-headed beasts emerge, who demand the worship that is due only to the Lord God Almighty. Those who resist are beheaded; their death is called their conquering. A beautifully seductive whore rides one of the beasts, but she is destroyed, as are the beasts and Satan who empowers them. The world is redeemed, the heavenly city New Jerusalem descends to earth, all God’s people celebrate the ultimate happy ending.

A summary paragraph in no way can replace the experience of reading or hearing Revelation, but the point is made: here we are confronted with a new world, not just some weird things that intrude into our ordinary world but leave it intact. That, we can handle. Nor is it the fantasy world of J. R. R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth or the pungently entertaining science fiction of Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. That, too, we can handle. The strange new world within Revelation is not merely a matter of red dragons and fiery pits but turns our everyday world, which we assume to be the real world, upside down (Acts 17:6)—the world of which we are the center, the world in which our values are supreme and the meaning of life is centered in our will being done on earth, with the assumption that heaven agrees and supports our values.

Revelation claims to reveal how the world, the real world, ultimately is—albeit through the medium of bizarre apocalyptic imagery (on which more below). Here is a world created and ruled by the one true God, the Almighty, who rescues his world-gone-astray from the power of evil, and whose almighty power is manifest not in killing his enemies but in the death of his Son at the hands of authorized religious and political leaders. Prior to the final victory of God and the establishment of God’s universal rule, God’s purpose is carried out in the world by his people, called into being by God’s own word, a community of faith called to follow the path of God’s Son: loving care for others, which means suffering and even death, confident that God’s victorious power will soon be manifest to all. Here is a world centered around God the creator in worship and praise. Our self-centeredness, the pursuit of our individualistic happiness, even our own idealistic efforts to make a better world, here finds its true center.

The strange new world of the Bible is a distant world, in which we should not feel at home too quickly. It is distant not only in time and space but also in language, in culture, and in its basic assumptions about what’s what. Perhaps the first task in both pulpit and pew is not to be in too great a hurry to overcome this distance but to acknowledge it, then to respect it. Communication across the gap, if this be the final goal, can’t be done unless and until the reality of this gap is acknowledged and respected. Many American tourists have learned not to evaluate other countries and cultures from the perspective of their own assumptions. They are not like us; when we evaluate everything in the world through modern Western eyes, we never see them as they are, we can neither appreciate nor draw back from them as they are, we can say neither an honest yes or an honest no. In the Bible, this respect for the other is called holiness.

The response that is constantly called for is repentance (Greek metanoia). As understood by Revelation, repentance is not being-sorry-in-a-religious-mood, not adding on another worthy cause, not trying a little harder to be a little nicer, but a reorientation of the way we think and live, lining up our thought world with reality, God’s new creation that is already under way. Repentance is reorientation, getting a new compass, a new understanding of what’s what, what’s real, and what matters. Such repentance is not a once-for-all act that can be checked off the list. The messages to the seven churches regularly call them to repent (Rev 2:5, 16, 22; 3:3, 19), to renew their awareness of the strange new world revealed to them in the Bible and the good news of the Christian faith, for reality is not what it appears to be through the lens of cultural common sense. It requires a revelation to bring God’s world into view. To see the world and ourselves as we really are requires repentance.

This was the life- (and world-) changing reality that grasped the life of a young preacher-theologian of the last century, whose legacy continues to enliven and nourish the church and its ministry. Karl Barth’s story is well known in theological circles, but perhaps we have never pondered it from the point of view of the preacher’s weekly quest, the burden and joy of authentic preaching.

The young minister was well educated, firmly and pleasantly located as the respected pastor of a county-seat church in a beautiful part of the world. So what’s the problem? He discovered that the Christian principles he had been taught as the core of the Christian faith did not ring true in the chaos and collapse of idealism of World War I—even though he was at a safe distance in his Swiss mountain-village pastorate. In quest of an authentic word from God, he toiled and struggled with Paul’s letter to the Romans, came once again within hearing distance of the Bible’s own message, and began to preach in a way that not only renewed his own ministry but also caught the attention of the wider church. In these early days, when he was a congregational pastor who preached every Sunday morning, and later as a professor who preached every Sunday afternoon to the inmates of the Basel prison, Barth was often invited to address groups of ministers about the new dynamism and content of his preaching. These essays were collected. One of his speeches is called The Strange New World within the Bible.² His central point: in-depth study that listens anew for the Word of God that comes through the Scripture doesn’t just change the individual (born-again evangelicalism) or transform society (the old liberalism in which he had been educated), but gives a new world. The personal and social transformations brought about by God’s Word are elements of a cosmic transformation. The same volume includes this memorable first-person account, with which many preachers can identify:

On Sunday morning when the bell rings to call the congregation and minister to church, there is in the air an expectancy that something great, crucial, and momentous is to happen. How strong this expectancy is in the people who are interested, or even whether there are any people whatever who consciously cherish it, is not our question now. Expectancy is inherent in the whole situation.

. . . Before him lies the Bible, full of mystery: and before him are seated his more or less numerous hearers, also full of mystery—What now? asks the minister.³

It was not merely that Barth discovered something new to preach in Romans. A particular biblical text served as the entrance to the strange new world of the Bible as a whole. The world is seen as it truly is—the beloved creation of the one God who has acted and is acting to renew and restore the whole creation. This biblical worldview of the wholeness of history and reality as the beloved creation of the one God who has acted and is acting to reconcile and restore it to himself calls for a reorientation—repentance—that cannot be absorbed piecemeal. It is not a matter of appropriating increments of information, insight, or inspiration that we fit into our old world, the way one brings a few items of new furniture into the same old house. It is a shaking of the foundations, not only of our little self-constructed houses but also of our self-constructed world. Repentance, the transformation of our minds to conform to God’s new age and God’s new world (Rom 12:1), does not mean making adjustments to new ideas one at a time but is a reorientation of the whole of our thinking, believing, and acting. The sum and center of this new world is expressed in the confession Jesus is the Christ, Jesus is Lord, which must be accepted as a whole or not at all. One lives either in one’s self-constructed reality or in the world as presented in the Bible, which means accepting its reality. We’re not speaking, of course, about the ancient biblical worldview with its three-decker cosmology and demons as the cause of sickness. We speak here of the biblical world of which God is creator, a world God did not abandon when it ignored or rebelled against its maker and Lord, a world in which God has acted definitively, a world God will ultimately restore and redeem. It is not merely a matter of individualistic conversion (born-again evangelicalism) or improving society (old liberalism) but is a matter of a new world. It is a matter of which world we believe we actually live in, which world is the real world, not of cosmetic adjustments to the old world. Since the strange new world of the Bible claims to represent ultimate reality, believing the Bible or believing the gospel cannot mean fitting the kingdom of God and salvation into this-worldly boxes shaped by our view of space-time reality and common sense. This is the nature and claim of all God-talk that speaks of and for the biblical God, the claim of every book in the Christian Bible. Elsewhere in the canonical library, biblical authors seem to offer more open space that adjoins our own everyday world, space that gives us more room to retain our own sense of what’s what. Revelation provides us much less opportunity for smuggling in our own replacement world. We don’t like it, but it can be our door into the strange new world of the Bible.

Revelation Is Prophecy and Theology

The people walking along the road do not and cannot figure out the meaning and destination of the road on their own. John declares that the mystery of God’s plan for history has been revealed to God’s servants the prophets (Rev 10:7), among whom John numbers himself; he considers what he writes to be prophecy (1:1–3).

In claiming to be a prophet, John does not mean merely that he predicts the future. While there is an element of prediction in biblical prophecy, the forecasting of long-range historical events occurs only minimally, is entirely absent from several prophetic books, and cannot be considered an essential ingredient of biblical prophecy. When biblical prophets do make predictions, these are typically not long-range historical forecasts but the word of God for the short-range future of their hearers, sometimes seen in the framework of God’s plan for the ultimate future of the world. The mark of the biblical prophet is neither It seems to me . . . nor Here is some information about what will happen seven hundred years from now but Thus says the Lord—about the meaning of your own life and times. A common definition of a biblical prophet is one who speaks for God. Better is One through whom God speaks. John is such a prophet.

To be sure, John is a spokesman for the risen Lord, a prophet who has charismatic visionary and auditory experiences of the reality of God and