The book of Revelation is undeniably violent. Much of its imagery is the stuff of nightmares, and the violence comes from all over. Yet, despite the pervasiveness of this violence, it is remarkable that none is perpetrated by or exhorted by the church. However, this doesn’t mean Jesus’ followers are just along for the ride, waiting out the suffering until the dragon’s ferocity and God’s avenging justice have run their course. As Brian K. Blount has argued, John’s Apocalypse portrays and encourages active nonviolence, even resistance. It engages our social and political imaginations and inspires the church to consider what it means to be followers of Jesus amid times of political turmoil. Though Revelation might not be the first place many turn for edification, the book is a meaningful resource for imagining nonviolent resistance.
Though Revelation might not be the first place many turn for edification, the book is a meaningful resource for imagining nonviolent resistance.
Narrating Violence
One problem with many popular readings of Revelation is that they don’t make those who should be uncomfortable uncomfortable. They don’t call out collusion with exploitative powers or unmask economic violence. They justify environmental exploitation through escapist end-time speculation. But why should Revelation need to make us uncomfortable? I believe it is literature for those experiencing oppression and those tempted to give in. A good reading requires an understanding of context as we learn to demystify domination, unmask power, and testify to another world amid this violent one.
In the process, we should be careful with the rhetoric of “violence.” Those with power highly police this term to define what can count as violence and how to distinguish “legitimate violence” and destabilizing “violent threats.”
The designation of a peaceful protest as violent, for example, can serve as political posturing to justify reactionary and authoritarian violence as “peacekeeping.” The purveyors of this rhetoric are interested in defining terms, narrating the story, and directing our social imaginations, and Rome was no different.
Rome understood itself as a purveyor of legitimate violence, though it marketed its violence as the foundation for its greatest marketable virtue, the pax Romana (the Roman peace). Rome plastered its legitimate violence in public spaces, images, and rhetoric around the empire. However, marginal voices sometimes break through the noise, such as Calgacus, a foreign general in Tacitus’s Agricola who encourages resistance to Roman imperialism, stating, “Rome creates a desert and calls it peace.” Roman “peace” requires continual war, violence and devastation.
Revelation portrays the pax Romana similarly. Elizabeth Schüssler Fiorenza argues that the well-known four horsemen of Chapter 6 depict life under Roman domination. Thus, John paints an alternate picture that dismantles the official Roman script. There is no peace or economic well-being. There is war and economic exploitation, and the hope of creation is the divine salvation and wrath
of the Lamb.
“Wrath” isn’t a four-letter word
For many, things get uncomfortable — perhaps rightly so, considering some of Revelation’s rhetoric. For instance, John’s gendered tropes for Babylon and their potential for legitimating gender-based violence should be named and rejected. Some language, however, that makes us uncomfortable may function precisely through this discomfort.
When I teach the Babylonian exile, I often read Psalm 137:
“By the rivers of Babylon — there we sat down, and there we wept when we remembered Zion” (v.1). Judah’s captors torment and mock them, asking them to sing for them. And with this psalm, they do sing a dirge – a jeremiad – that ends with a pair of vicious beatitudes: “Happy shall they be who pay you back what you have done to us! Happy shall they be who take your little ones and dash them against the rock” (v. 8-9).
Seemingly by design, this is difficult to read and preach. Retaliatory child killing is not easy sermon fodder. Yet, this is not a treatise on the proper uses of infanticide. The psalm invites readers to feel the people’s pain and hopelessness. The vicious terminology is not a directive but an attempt to describe the indescribable. For those experiencing oppression, the song is a vehicle to express unspeakable lament. For those outside, it gives some way to hear a modicum of that experience.
Seemingly by design, [Revelation] is difficult to read and preach.
Similarly, the language of Revelation is not for polite company. Schüssler Fiorenza depicts Revelation as “written with a ‘jail-house’ perspective, asking for the realization of God’s justice and power. It, therefore, can only be understood by those who ‘hunger and thirst for justice.’” As John invokes holy war imagery and God as divine warrior, one might wonder, “Where is the enemy love?” Where is the belief that even our enemies have some good in them? John’s world is dualistic. The battle is between good and evil, which means he doesn’t fall prey to both-side-ism. John’s God chooses a side and doesn’t ask the mourning to speak words of appeasement to the powerful — or to remember that “there are good people on both sides.” Instead, John offers hope by vividly dismantling the claims and myths of oppressive power, creating space to imagine life differently.
Dominant myths and unmasked powers
John is interested in judgment against cosmic, systemic, structural power and evil. The dragon (Satan), the beast (Rome) and the kings of the earth all represent oppressive powers. These, who oppress the just, are the primary focus of God’s anger. Persons are culpable to the degree they tie themselves to these realities. Throughout, John depicts a colonized people captivated by Rome’s seemingly unconquerable power, declaring in worship, “Who can fight against it?” (13:4). John’s task is to free them from this captivation.
The beast stands always, already conquered. The dragon’s power, through the beast, has already proven powerless, having been defeated at Jesus’ bloody execution by victorious life that conquers the beast’s death-dealing. Moreover, the beast, and thus Rome, is conquered by one whom “the state” deemed a killable, political threat to peace. This criminal, in John’s imaging, has turned cosmic lord. For John’s readers, the possibility now exists that the eternal, indomitable city and empire may not be invincible and perhaps is already defeated. Martin Luther King Jr. writes in Why We Can’t Wait, “The old order ends … when the enslaved, within themselves, bury the psychology of servitude.” In John’s imagination, the ostensibly dominated one is revealed as lord of all, and the Lamb’s witnesses share in this domination-system-dismantling vision.
Exposing myths that mask and maintain structures of servitude benefits nonviolent resistance, but this often requires an unsettling jolt. However, Walter Brueggemann argues that in appropriating these myths, dominant culture is grossly uncritical and, when confronted, can be reactive and unable to tolerate serious criticism.
Consider the current assault on any discussion of race, gender and sexuality, which has involved draconian restrictions and censorship of anything perceived to discuss diversity, equity, or inclusion (DEI) or so-called “race and gender ideologies.” These actions demonstrate a dominant culture’s attempt to regulate and maintain imbalances of power that it believes is its right. Similarly, national stories are carefully and reactively policed in history textbooks; the stories we tell and accept matter.
Alternately, elements of the dominant culture can appropriate the rhetoric of persecution where no persecution exists, claiming for itself the mantle of suffering to shield its own power and privileges. Think of, for example, the current administration’s executive order, “Eradicating Anti-Christian Bias.” How might this be seen through the lens of John’s Apocalypse? My biased lens might consider Revelation 13:11, where a new beast rises from the earth, appearing somewhat like a lamb (5:6), a poor reflection of the Lamb, yet sounding like a dragon. Without prescribing absolute readings, Revelation offers a way of reimagining events, actions and myths of power.
… Revelation offers a lens for reimagining events, actions and myths of power according to an alternate imagination.
The Lamb makes war
“Then I saw heaven opened, and there was a white horse! Its rider is called Faithful and True, and in righteousness he judges and wages war. His eyes are like a flame of fire, and on his head are many diadems, and he has a name inscribed that no one knows but himself. He is clothed in a robe dipped in blood, and his name is called The Word of God. And the armies of heaven, wearing fine linen, white and pure, were following him on white horses. From his mouth comes a sharp sword with which to strike down the nations, and he will rule[c] them with a scepter of iron; he will tread the winepress of the fury of the wrath of God the Almighty (Revelation 19:11–15).
John’s Apocalypse holds a theme of war-making, but our nonviolent church has no part in perpetrating it. Instead, as far as that term is used, war is primarily executed by the powers, systems, and structures we noted above. War is made on earth by the dragon (Satan, 12:17), the beast (Rome, 11:7; 13:7), the kings of the earth (7:14; 16:14; 19:19), and even the locusts, which are an allegory for invading armies (9:6, 9; Joel 1–2). In heaven, the angels and dragon make war, but overall, war-making is the provenance of the powers of domination.
There are two telling exceptions. In 2:16 and 19:15, the Lamb makes war against the powers of domination, with a sword coming out of his mouth. Jesus is victorious in a war of Word. Jesus, of course, has already conquered the beast’s best weapons, death and execution, with life in his own blood, where this blood represents Jesus’ death-conquering life. This latter battle seems almost a formality, but now, the powerlessness of the dragon’s weapons is on display when conquered by Jesus by fundamentally different means.
Nonviolent resistance benefits from exposing powerful imaginaries that mask and maintain structures and systems of servitude.
If there were official reminders everywhere in the Roman world that peace, justice, and salvation come by Roman war-making, then this scene strikes a blow at this war-making pillar of their domination myth.
The Conquering Witnesses of the Lamb
“But they have conquered him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony, for they did not cling to life even in the face of death” (Revelation 12:11).
Though the Lamb in Chapter 19 is the only one to make combat with his wordy sword (or sword-like words), the Lamb is not alone. An “army” accompanies him, most assuredly those witnesses vindicated in heaven and those said to “follow the Lamb wherever he goes” (14:4). Though these witnesses produce no swords, they are not passive, and 12:11 articulates their active witness. These are those who conquer (1) because of the Lamb’s blood, (2) because of their testimony, and (3) as Craig Koester translates it, because “love for their lives did not make them shun death.” These saints are active, and their activity is, above all, imitating Jesus.
Beginning with (3), it is easy to miss in translation, but this clause about life and death clearly invokes Jesus’ well-known saying about the cost of discipleship and picking up one’s cross:
“For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it” (Mark 8:35).
This saying is not about passive suffering or suffering’s ability to accomplish anything. Nor is Jesus calling anyone to suffer for suffering’s sake. Jesus is calling disciples to join him in confronting the powers in Jerusalem, even if it means death. There are two sets of parallel wants here. Whoever wants “self” loses everything. However, even if one loses one’s life (self), by joining Jesus’ active resistance, one ultimately conquers death. Those who actively resist are called to embrace life, not death or suffering. At the cross, Jesus confronts the powers of domination and death with life, and life triumphs over the strategies of death. Here (1), we return to Revelation 12:11; the Lamb’s blood (and bloody death) washes one clean. Because Jesus’ death in faithful commitment represents a life in resistance to death, Jesus leads disciples out of the captivation of death and into life.
Those who actively resist are called to embrace life, not death or suffering.
This is why (2) John describes Jesus as the faithful witness-example (martys, 1:5; 2:13). John states that the Lamb’s army of witnesses conquer because of their witness-example-testimony (martyrion), which is the witness-example-testimony of Jesus, both about him and the testimony he gives and embodies. John structures this language carefully. To be a witness-example (or martyr, though death is not required) is an active reality, a witness to resistance. A witness testifies to a truth through word, action or embodied life. Jesus’ status as the foundational witness is laid from the beginning; witnesses embodying the faithful witness are set free in their taking on Jesus’ active discipleship resistance outlined above.
Finally, this imitation demonstrates an-other kingdom. As Rowan Williams writes in Why Study the Past? The Question for the Historical Church, “The martyr is the conduit of divine presence who vindicates the claim to another citizenship.” In the early church, martyrs were those who publicly confessed Jesus as lord, which Romans received as rejecting Caesar’s authority. They didn’t see room for both Jesus and Caesar; they were as incompatible as God and Mammon. Christians were even condemned as “atheists” because confessing Jesus’ lordship denied the cosmic ordering that structured Roman life — that is, it denied Rome’s domination myth. In Revelation, all of this is predicated on witnesses becoming the imitators and embodiers of the Lamb.
Concluding for an active nonviolent resistance
Near the end of his life, Martin Luther King Jr. sought to draw more attention to what he called the triple evils of racism, poverty and militarism, and he became increasingly unpopular. Nevertheless, he pushed on, marching with labor, considering occupation of Chicago’s highways and bringing government to a halt. Were these nonviolent protests? They were indeed active, confrontational and condemned by the state. J. Edgar Hoover, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, said of King openly in 1967, “ … it is clear that [King] is an instrument in the hands of subversive forces seeking to undermine our nation.” Soon, in April 1968, King himself would die a martyr.
Revelation calls the church to a counter-kingdom and a scandalous witness, following the path of the Lamb in active nonviolence.
Pursuing active nonviolence is often difficult, accompanied by vilification and rejection by the purveyors of power. Revelation aids resistance by deconstructing the dominant noise, exposing the false myths, providing a pattern of action and offering hope for a different world. There, the church learns language and lyrics for worship as resistance, forming identity and solidarity as a counter-kingdom. John’s narrative calls the church to follow, embody and proclaim the subversive witness of Jesus, the Lamb who wages war with the sword from his mouth. Considering the centrality of imitation and the importance of embodying the quintessential witness-example in our active, faithful witness, it is a short leap to embodying Jesus’ own “combat,” a clear pattern for an active word and sharp witness for justice, peace and God’s reign — a commitment to speak justice clearly as the foundation for peace and conciliation.
Revelation calls the church to a counter-kingdom and a scandalous witness, following the path of the Lamb in active nonviolence. May our eyes be open to these possibilities as we approach Revelation anew as a resource for a common hope and guidance to follow Jesus in the way of peace.
