Read Revelations: Visions, Prophecy, and Politics in the Book of Revelation for Free Online Page A

tothat war, now seen as the Great Tribulation that precedes God’s final judgment:
    Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord;
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;
He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible, swift sword
;
Our God is marching on.
     
    We need not rehearse the history of religious violence—from crusaders fighting “infidels” and inquisitors torturing and killing Jews to save their immortal souls, to Catholics and Protestants fighting religious wars from the sixteenth century on, or Christian groups engaged in vigilante violence to the present time, or the wartime rhetoric of world leaders—to realize how often those who wield power and see themselves standing on God’s side against Satan’s have sought to force “God’s enemies” to submit or be killed. Such apocalyptic fervor, whether engaged in by Christians or Muslims, allows no neutral ground between God’s kingdom and the lake of fire, and no room for compromise, much less for human—or humane—interaction.
    During the years in which Christians debated whether to place the Book of Revelation into the church’s definitive canon, other writers inspired by John of Patmos revised and amplified his warnings of the coming judgment. The scholar David Frankfurter has shown how the anonymous author of the Revelation of Elijah, writing in Egypt circa 250, updated “the signs of the time” to warn his contemporaries of God’s coming judgment. 4 The Revelation of Paul, too, sharply separated the saved from the damned, taking special care to show how the divine judge would tailor hell’s tortures to fit each sinner’s crime, 5 as its author contributed to a stream that eventually would include Dante’s
Inferno
and Milton’s
Paradise Lost,
and paintings by artists as diverse as Michelangelo and Bosch, William Blake and Picasso, as well as countless films and video games being produced to this day.
    Yet John’s Book of Revelation appeals not only to fear but also to hope. As John tells how the chaotic events of the world are finally set right by divine judgment, those who engage his visions often see them offering meaning—moral meaning—in times of suffering or apparently random catastrophe. Many poets, artists, and preachers who engage these prophecies claim to have found in them the promise, famously repeated by Martin Luther King Jr., that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” 6
    Finally, too, this worst of all nightmares ends not in terror but in a glorious new world, radiant with the light of God’s presence, flowing with the water of life, abounding in joy and delight. Whether one sees in John’s visions the destruction of the whole world or the dark tunnel that propels each of us toward our own death, his final vision suggests that even after the worst we can imagine has happened, we may find the astonishing gift of new life. Whether one shares that conviction, few readers miss seeing how these visions offer consolation and that most necessary of divine gifts—hope.
    But we have seen that the story of this book moves beyond its own pages to include the church leaders who made it the final book in the New Testament canon, which they then declaredclosed, and scriptural revelation complete. After Athanasius sought to censor all
other
“revelations” and to silence all whose views differed from the orthodox consensus, his successors worked hard to make sure that Christians could not read “any books except the common catholic books.” 7
    Orthodox Christians acknowledge that some revelation may occur even now, but since most accept as genuine only what agrees with the traditional consensus, those who speak for minority—or original—views are often excluded.
    Left out are the visions that lift their hearers beyond apocalyptic polarities to see the human race as a whole—and, for that matter, to see each one of us as a whole, having the