Notes on Revelation for the Rest of Us (part 1)

 

I've started reading Revelation for the Rest of Us by Scot McKnight and Cody Matchett. I'm going to take notes here on the blog as I read. These will just be raw notes, attempts to capture the main points along the way, as well as my own occasional responses, questions, bafflements, etc. 

The subtitle of the book is "A prophetic call to follow Jesus as a dissident disciple." Those last two words jump out at you, right? I mean, there are many books on discipleship, but dissident discipleship? 

The description on the flap might help us understand it a bit:

John designed his book of Revelation to disciple readers into dissidents of the ways of the world and empire, describing the empire with the term "Babylon"--a timeless image of empire, militarism, economic exploitation, injustice and oppression. John's disciples can discern the presence of Babylon in our world and learn to speak up, speak out, and walk in the way of the Lamb.

This is the part that really resonated with me and it's why I bought the book in the first place. You sense right away that McKnight and Matchett are providing a counterpoint to the rampant Americanism and Christian Nationalist in the church today.

In the first chapter the authors talk about the typical ways in which Revelation has been interpreted. He quotes G. B. Caird: Revelation as become "a paradise for fanatics and sectarians."

This is not a book that is going to map contemporary world events against the blueprint of Revelation. McKnight and Matchett are not treating Revelation as a predictive text that readers should mine in search of the date of Christ's return or the true meaning behind the headlines on our news feeds.

They call tis the "speculative approach" and much of the chapter is devoted to explaining the weakness of the speculative reading of Revelation. It leads people to read the text predictively, literally, premillenially, and vindictively. But this is not how the church has read Revelation throughout history!

But many of us are so used to thinking this way about John's mysterious book, we can think of no other. Here's a quote from Nelson Kraybill: "The last book of the Bible is not a catalog of predictions about events that would take place two thousand years later. Rather, it is a projector that casts archetypical images of good and evil onto a cosmic screen."

Getting back to that word "dissident." When I think of that word, dissidents, I think of Russian dissidents in the 70s, like Sholzhenitsyn. They were dissidents against "the powers that be." The authors say we need dissident disciples, willing to dissent against corruption in both church and culture.

The book of Revelation, when read well, forms us into dissident disciples who discern corruptions in the world and church. Conformity to the world is the problem. Discipleship requires dissidence when one lives in Babylon.

 As I said, this resonates with me. A Christian is, as the tagline of this blog says, not at home in this world. This world is our Babylon. But I have some hesitation with thinkin of myself as a dissident. I want to be a quiet Cristian, following Jesus were I live, not shouting from the rooftops (or in my dissident samisdat). We'll have to read on to see what McKnight and Matchett have to say to hesitators like me!