The Apocalypse
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Today, we face the monsters that are at our door and bring the fight to them. Today, we are cancelling the apocalypse.

We're listening to a clip from the 2013 sci-fi blockbuster Pacific Rim, where the character, Stacker Pentecost, played by the wonderful Idris Elba, delivers a pump-up speech to his ragtag band of pilots.

The group are demoralized after a long, bloody war against murderous giant robots that have emerged from the Pacific Ocean via an interdimensional portal. If that plotline sounds weird to you, because you're not Mark Hadley, then our topic today, the last book of the Bible, is going to be seriously strange. Today, we're tackling the book of Revelation.

There aren't many parts of the Bible that excite the imagination more than this thrilling climax to the Good Book. Funnily enough, the list of events in Revelation isn't too dissimilar to what we find in Pacific Rim. There are monsters that emerge from the sea. There are the four horsemen of the apocalypse, the mark of the beast, battles against cosmic armies, and even dragons.

It's also a book with countless interpretations. It's seen as symbolic by some, but read by others in a way that has very real geopolitical implications. Today, it's common for people to simply avoid reading Revelation. But as our guest today tells us, we do so at our quite literal peril. With all the misunderstandings and it's-too-hard-to-read palaver,

Are we, just like Idris Elba, cancelling the apocalypse? Well, I think some apocalypses, certainly the original one in the book of Revelation, are good news for everyone. For the sceptic, for the believer, literally for the whole cosmos. I'm John Dixon, and this is Undeceptions. Undeceptions

This season of Undeceptions is sponsored by Zondervan Academic. Get discounts on master lectures, video courses and exclusive samples of their books at zondervanacademic.com forward slash Undeceptions. Don't forget to write Undeceptions. Each episode here at Undeceptions, we explore some aspect of life, faith, philosophy, history, science, culture or ethics that

that's either much misunderstood or mostly forgotten. And with the help of people who know what they're talking about, we're trying to undeceive ourselves and let the truth out.

This episode of Undeceptions is brought to you by Zondervan Academics' new book, ready for it? Mere Christian Hermeneutics, Transfiguring What It Means to Read the Bible Theologically, by the brilliant Kevin Van Hooser. I'll admit that's a really deep-sounding title, but don't let that put you off. Kevin is one of the most respected theological thinkers in the world today.

And he explores why we consider the Bible the word of God, but also how you make sense of it from start to finish. Hermeneutics is just the fancy word for how you interpret something. So if you want to dip your toe into the world of theology, how we know God, what we can know about God, then this book is a great starting point. Looking at how the church has made sense of the Bible through history, but also how you today can make sense of it.

Mere Christian Hermeneutics also offers insights that are valuable to anyone who's interested in literature, philosophy, or history. Kevin doesn't just write about faith, he's also there to hone your interpretative skills. And if you're eager to engage with the Bible, whether as a believer or as a doubter, this might be essential reading.

You can pre-order your copy of Mere Christian Hermeneutics now at Amazon, or you can head to zondervanacademic.com forward slash undeceptions to find out more. Don't forget, zondervanacademic.com forward slash undeceptions. Revelation is so filled with imagery and requires interpretation and imagination to

always peppered with a little bit of speculation, it can lead to... That's Professor Scott McKnight. He's one of the best known New Testament scholars in America. He's at Northern Seminary just outside Chicago. I don't know how many books he's written, but it's at least 30, that's for sure.

I particularly remember his one on Jewish mission in the ancient world because I disagreed with it at length in my doctoral thesis on the birth of Christianity. But for the purposes of this episode, he was no doubt right and I was wrong.

His latest book, Just Out, is Revelation for the Rest of Us, published by our friends at Zondervan Academic. The book unpacks all the weird, wonderful and confusing parts of Revelation while busting a few myths about it along the way. It can lead to people seeing in the text what they want to see. They can see the characters that they want to see.

And there is a long history. When you have such a negative image, as you find with Babylon, and it's clear that Babylon is a political, well, of course, it's a city, and it's a political condition, Rome, obviously, in the first century, it leads people to see in Babylon Rome.

the politics of their day. And before long, they've been able to write a divine story of their own truth. And they will see their enemies as God's enemies. And it will be just like Dante's Inferno. All the people he doesn't like in Italy are right there. And that's sort of what has happened to the book of Revelation.

We'll definitely be doing a whole episode on Dante's Divine Comedy and his three realms of the afterlife, the Inferno, or Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise. As Scott just said, Dante basically put all the people he didn't like in his Inferno, including his political foes and even a couple of popes.

Happily, the venerable bead made it into Dante's paradise. But back to today's topic. If you're not familiar with the layout of Revelation, never fear. We touched on this in our episode titled World's End back in season three. But because quite a bit of time has passed since then, let's rewind to what I told you about it way back then.

The book of Revelation is made up of a series of five visions with an introduction or prologue and an epilogue inviting us to take all the content seriously. It's written by John sometime probably in the 90s AD, just 60 or so years after the death of Jesus.

The storyline of the book is not told in a linear way, which is part of why it's so difficult to read for us today. But it basically goes like this. It begins with seven actual letters to seven known churches in Asia Minor, or what we call Turkey. There's a brief letter to Ephesus, then to Smyrna, Pergamon, and so on. Some of these churches were beginning to experience persecution, bloody persecution in some cases.

And the letters urge believers to stay true to Christ, even being willing to give up their lives for him if they have to.

And with that introduction, John goes on to describe visions he's received as he's taken up into heaven. And the visions focus on how history will unfold to its glorious climax. There's a great scroll in heaven that contains the secret of history. And only one person can be found who's worthy to reveal its contents. It's a lamb.

who's been slain. It's obviously Jesus. And that's a key to the whole show. Despite the violent imagery that follows, the point is that the tyrannies of Rome are going to be overthrown by a slain lamb.

and his people who are willing to die in faithfulness to the Lamb. And so as the seals of the scroll are broken, catastrophes come on the earth. There's horses and swords and blood and trumpets and fire. All the common images of Roman warfare are here turned against tyranny itself.

Then there's a dragon, a beast out of the sea, another beast on the land, all wreaking havoc on the world and on the people of God in particular. Until angels appear and pour out plagues and burning sulfur on the earth and the great kingdom of Babylon, as it's called, a picture of Rome, comes crashing down and the world rejoices at the overthrow of tyranny.

Then toward the end, there's a vision of a thousand year period when the powers of evil are locked up and God's people rule the earth. And then Satan is weirdly let loose again. And it looks like all the pain and tyranny will begin all over. But then with the snap of a finger.

or actually a sword out of the mouth of Jesus, the whole thing fizzes. The devil and his collaborators are thrown into the lake of fire and God creates a new heaven and a new earth where peace and justice reign for eternity. Makes perfect sense, right?

I admit this is a pretty strange and confusing part of the Bible for modern folks. That's not the book's fault, though. It's because our culture, unlike the one to which this book was written, doesn't read and write apocalyptic anymore.

Apocalyptic was an established literary genre. The Book of Revelation is the only example of the genre that's maintained popularity through history, but there were many examples of this style in the centuries just before the biblical text.

Apocalyptic is a genre of writing that emerged among Jews around the third century B.C. It focused on the end of the world, although it might be better to say it focused on the proper endpoints of the world.

It used symbolic and supernatural events as a kind of code to say things look grim now but there will be a divine disclosure. That's what apocalypse means, disclosure or revelation. And that disclosure will upend evil and establish good in the world.

Here's a bit of the book. It introduces a raft of characters many scholars believe represent different socio-political entities that would have been familiar to the audiences hearing the book read in first century Asia Minor. One of the seven angels who had the seven bowls came and said to me, "Come, I will show you the punishment of the great prostitute who sits by many waters."

With her the kings of the earth committed adultery, and the inhabitants of the earth were intoxicated with the wine of her adulteries. Then the angel carried me away in the spirit into a wilderness. There I saw a woman sitting on a scarlet beast that was covered with blasphemous names and had seven heads and ten horns.

The woman was dressed in purple and scarlet and was glittering with gold, precious stones and pearls. She held a golden cup in her hand, filled with abominable things and the filth of her adulteries. The name written on her forehead was a mystery: Babylon the Great, the mother of prostitutes and the abominations of the earth. I saw that the woman was drunk with the blood of God's holy people, the blood of those who bore testimony to Jesus.

Woohoo! Drunk with the blood of God's holy people. Full on. It fits very neatly within the apocalyptic genre of the ancient world, but it's a radical departure from the more straightforward historical works of the Gospels or the epistles of Paul to the early churches. So I asked Scott to unpack this genre a little more.

Most apocalyptic people would explain apocalyptic as a response to a crisis political situation in the history of Israel. And instead of writing, let's say, concrete stuff that happens on planet Earth in normal ways, it's almost turned into an imaginary world. And with that, you start getting beasts and animals and animals.

heaven and trumpets and divine judgments, and it just starts getting really big. So I tell my students, in some ways, it's like the last battle of the Chronicles of Narnia. It sounds like stuff going on in the Lord of the Rings, and I tell them I haven't read Harry Potter, but I'll bet it's in Harry Potter too. It seems to take good and bad and turn it into just huge cosmic stories. And

to say at the same time that God is going to bring judgment on injustice. God is going to erase evil from the world and that there will be justice and peace and love someday. It also says that the people who do what is right, who are faithful in following Jesus are going to be the people who turn out to be on the right side at the end of time. And, um,

A friend of mine who's a professor in Texas says the book of Revelation can be reduced to three simple statements. God's team wins. Choose your team. Don't be stupid.

And that's almost an apocalyptic, that's almost an apocalyptic God's team is going to win. So that when I turn politics in the United States away from, let's say, the Republican Party and the Democratic Party to a cosmic battle between good and evil, I'm starting to move into the world of apocalyptic. There's also that sense that we're on the edge of time and something big could happen really soon.

And that heightens everybody's alertness and willingness to listen and, you know, in some cases repent and change or in other cases to harden and fight. Now, this is not just a slippery academic, you know, literary explanation of this weird book of the Bible. It's actually an established genre. So tell me, like, what are some other concrete examples so my skeptical listeners go, oh, okay, so it's a real thing already before the book of Revelation is written? Yeah.

Okay, say the Dead Sea Scrolls that were discovered at Qumran, or in caves around Qumran, I know there's debates about that, but they have a text that we abbreviate as 1QM, at least it was until they started giving everything numbers, and I lost track of everything. And it describes a battle between the sons of light and the sons of darkness.

And that's apocalyptic. And that's the way people coped with the impossibility of changing the world themselves.

If you're a regular listener, or just someone with an interest in history, you've likely heard of the Dead Sea Scrolls. For new players though, the Dead Sea Scrolls was a major 20th century archaeological discovery. And in those caves by the Dead Sea, they found tens of thousands of fragments of over 900 ancient scrolls. They date from between the 3rd century BC to AD 100.

Included among the scrolls are some of the oldest surviving copies of the Hebrew Bible itself. It was a treasure trove of ancient Jewish literature that shone spectacular new light on the lives of ancient Semitic people.

The Dead Sea Scrolls now feature regularly on lists of the greatest archaeological finds of all time, right up there with the tomb of Tutankhamen, Pompeii, Terracotta Army, and all of those things. In addition to scriptural texts, the Dead Sea Scrolls also included works of Jewish law, history, and apocalyptic.

If you go to the Shrine of the Book in Jerusalem, that's the museum where the Dead Sea Scrolls are housed, you'll see the classic example of Jewish apocalyptic on beautiful display. Technically, it's called 1QM. It's the War of the Sons of Light against the

The Sons of Darkness, or just The War Scroll. It tells of a great cosmic battle between the powers of evil, Belial, a devilish figure, and the people of God. The text amounts to a disclosure, a revelation to these marginalized Jews known as Essenes,

that their faithfulness is going to be rewarded against those tyrants who oppress them. The light will win. Here's just a taste. For the instructor, the rule of the war. The first attack by the Sons of Light will be launched against the lot of the Sons of Darkness against the army of Belial.

This is a time of salvation for the nation of God and for a period of rule for all of the men of his lot and of everlasting destruction for all of the lot of Belial. On the point of the javelin they shall write, Brightness of the spear of God's might.

The first battalion will be equipped with a spear and a shield, and the second battalion will be equipped with a shield and a sword to fell the dead by the judgment of God, to pay the reward of their evil towards every people of futility. For kingship belongs to the God of Israel, and with the holy ones of his nation he will work wonders. It's like Mennonites in the United States fighting for pacifism,

And they have absolutely no chance of convincing the Republican Party that peace is the way to go in pacifism. So they instead tell a magnificent cosmic story. There's going to be some battle. Some of my mates here in the US aren't going to love that.

Yes, Scott's a bit of a pacifist and apparently not always a huge fan of the Republican Party. Still, if you can forget the modern politics, please. The analogy isn't too bad. Apocalyptic tended to be written by the weaker underdog populace.

minorities in the culture. They used the image of military victory to speak of the downfall of their powerful oppressors. There's going to be some battle and God's going to win and the peaceniks are going to be the ones. So it's, you have no chance. I mean, we've all been in situations where we look at a really difficult situation in the world. I feel this way

about the oceans and the way we care for the oceans. I care this way about gun laws in the United States. I feel like what I believe to be true and consistent, I think, with the Christian message is impossible to achieve in the United States. Those are the people then that turn to apocalyptic to express what they think is going to happen someday when God makes things right.

We'll return to the United States and its complicated recent history with Revelation. But first, it's important to note that the wider church through history has had its fair share of grappling with this ancient text.

Revelation was one of the last books accepted into the biblical canon, you know, the modern Bible. And while it was read widely in the second and third centuries, some early church leaders expressed concerns about its weird style. And there was also some disquiet about the fact that weird fringe groups were really into Revelation. Not much has changed.

The so-called Council of Laodicea 363-364 didn't include Revelation in their biblical canon. Just three years later, though, Athanasius, the Bishop of Alexandria, included Revelation in his list of authoritative biblical texts, and subsequent councils in Hippo 393 and Carthage 397 further affirmed its official biblical status.

Episode 30 is cannon fodder, if you want more detail. Al's got you sorted in the show notes. All of this raises the obvious question. Who wrote this book of Revelation? I mean, I've read what you've said about this, so I know the views, but tell me, who do you reckon wrote this and give us some context? The tradition is it's the Apostle John.

I can live with that as long as we are willing to admit that we don't really know for sure.

But there's other people who would say the elder John, another John. There are lots of things in the book of Revelation that sound a little bit like the gospel of John. So there seems to be a connection. Some New Testament scholars I really respect reckon it wasn't John the apostle, the son of Zebedee, who wrote Revelation, but another John who was also an eyewitness to Jesus. But he was called John the elder. So there seems to be a connection.

But at the same time, it's almost like the mood of the book. It's not the same mood in the Gospel of John. So, you know, I was really into authorship questions for about 15 years of my academic career. And I got to where I thought, you know, we can't prove these things. I can get really confident about that Matthew wrote Matthew or that he didn't write Matthew. But then someone comes along and says to me, if I use your logic against Matthew, you're

You wouldn't be able to argue that. And I think that the arguments for authorship are precarious, but at least they are, we need to be more cautious. So I do think the book probably, it's after Nero, so, you know, whatever.

make it under Domitian. It's hard to know. But your gut feeling is it's Domitian, it's late first century. So let's just say the nineties. It may or may not be John Zebedee. You think it could be the elder John. Is that basically where you're sitting? Yeah, I can live with that. But I would also tell my students, if you offer me a convincing, a more convincing argument today, I might go with you on that one.

While the jury is sort of out on who the John of Revelation is, it's generally accepted by mainstream scholarship that Revelation was completed and in circulation by the close of the first century, let's say by 96-ish AD.

A big clue as to when it was written is working out the Roman Emperor at the time, and we have some leads. The influential Bishop of Gaul, Irenaeus, wrote his really famous work Against Heresies in AD 180. And he said of Revelation that it was the apocalyptic vision seen not very long ago, almost in our own generation, at the close of the reign of Domitian.

Okay, so that puts it between the years 81 and 96 of the first century. Other ancient authorities like Clement of Alexandria and Eusebius in the fourth century agree that Domitian was the tyrant under whom John lived and suffered.

Domitian was a jerk. That's a technical Latin term. Everyone seemed to have hated him. The Senate, the army, his own bodyguards. His imperial household servants, with the help of the higher-ups, murdered him in a Caesar-esque hail of stab wounds. It might be possible then to roughly discern when and why Revelation was written.

But we're still left with a lot of questions about the contents. What does it mean? Like I said a moment ago, apocalyptic literature is a kind of code language full of symbolic numbers, animals, colors, and stock metaphorical descriptions of heavenly judgment.

This symbolism was well understood by ancient Jews and Christians, but it was foreign to Greeks and Romans, and that was part of the point. You could say an awful lot about your oppressors if they had no clue what you were saying. I'm not throwing away my show.

That's an excerpt, of course, from the musical Hamilton, one of my all-time favourites. Hamilton is set in 18th century revolutionary America. It was billed as America then as told by America now. It's a good example of how major productions and stage shows are often used as a way to transmit a wider message on a mass scale, as well as to entertain, of course. And that is an entertaining musical.

In Revelation for the Rest of Us, our guest, Professor Scott McKnight, introduces the characters in Revelation. The whore of Babylon, the beasts of the sea and the land, the seven angels, and so on. It's a cast of characters who make up the performance of the book. And remember, Revelation would have been read aloud in the ancient world as a kind of performance.

To help us get a better sense of this, I asked Scott to walk us through the cast of this epic production in an Undeceptions rapid-fire round.

You describe what you call a playbill of revelation. I need to do some translation here. That means a theater program everywhere else in the world. But when you walk into a theater, you get a playbill or a theater program. It explains the characters and so on. I want to do a rapid fire round with you, Scott. I'm going to name some characters from Team Dragon, and you're just going to give me one sentence. Okay. All right? And then I'm going to list Team Lamb.

L-A-M-B. And you're going to give me one sentence, okay? This is going to be over in about 60 seconds. Okay. Here we go. Ready. Team Dragon. Speed round. Babylon. The city that embodies injustice and tyranny. Empire. Dragon. The cosmic beast behind and animating Babylon. Satan. The beast of the sea.

These are two political leaders. There's two of them, the sea and the land. Yeah, one of the sea, one of the earth, yep. Political leaders that are probably someone in particular in mind in the book of Revelation, but they would be political leaders who embody the way of Babylon and the dragon. Six, six, six. Nero. I loved your explanation of this. Short and simple. Yeah. Explain that to us.

Well, 666 is going to be almost certainly in the Jewish world, Gematria, for a name.

And there are different ways of calculating the name Nero. But one way is to add up the letters with Hebrew numbers and you're going to get 666. That's the Roman Emperor Nero who ruled from AD 54 to 68. And if you write out his name, Caesar Neron, it actually adds up to 666.

Anyway, he's one of the more infamous of the rulers of the Roman Empire. He was known for cruelty and debauchery, and he was the brains behind the first great persecution of Christians in the year 64. He scapegoated them for the great fire of Rome, which he himself may have ordered. He crucified Christians in his public gardens, and he set them alight.

He probably deserves his own Undeceptions episode because a lot of cool and tragic things went on by Christians under Nero's big nose. Yeah, so Nero. All right, but I've slowed us down. It's my fault, not yours. Can we go to Team Lamb? Rapid fire, Team Lamb. The Seven Spirits. The Holy Spirit. Boom. Seven Lampstands. Seven Churches.

The lamb? Jesus? We're shortening up our answers here. The lamb, I think, is a fascinating image is that John sees a lion.

And the next thing he sees a lamb. And so there's almost a morphing of the image of a lion into a lamb. And that changes the dynamic. Beautifully subversive. Yeah, yeah. Well, we'll get to that whole subversive thing in a second. I've just got one more character I want to shoot at Scott. But before I do, you may have noticed a significant absence from the cast, the Antichrist.

That's because the book of Revelation doesn't actually mention the Antichrist. The Bible only uses the term Antichrist four times, and they're all in the little letters of John.

There is the term pseudo-Christos or false messiah in the gospels. That's where Jesus warns his followers that there'll be other people sort of claiming to do signs and wonders and proclaiming themselves to be the Christ. And then there's Paul's man of lawlessness in 2 Thessalonians. And I guess he's a kind of antichrist figure.

In Revelation, we don't have an Antichrist as such, but we do have the beast with ten horns that comes to have dominion and authority over the earth before suffering eventual defeat at the hands of God. Okay, one last thing to throw at Scott. New Jerusalem. New Jerusalem is the ideal city where everything God wants to be for his creation happens.

occurs. It's actually so massive that it's almost LOL type thing. But I think it's a perfect embodiment of the will of God for the way of God's people in the world of God. And we can learn that we need to strive to live into New Jerusalem today. I don't think it's a prediction of 1948.

Just a reminder, 1948 is the year David Ben-Gurion, then head of the Jewish Agency, proclaimed the establishment of the State of Israel. On the same day, May 14, U.S. President Harry Truman recognized the new nation.

But Scott says that's not the New Jerusalem that the book of Revelation is talking about, though some would say otherwise. Some say that's a real world fulfillment of apocalyptic expectation, not the final New Jerusalem perhaps, but certainly a step or a hint in that direction.

And that's a problem, right? Who's to say who's right and who's wrong about interpreting such tricky texts? Surely, if God wanted us to understand him, he would have made himself clearer. Stick with us. There's more of that fun coming.

68-year-old Tirat was working as a farmer near his small village on the Punjab-Sindh border in Pakistan when his vision began to fail. Cataracts were causing debilitating pain and his vision impairment meant he couldn't sow crops.

It pushed his family into a financial crisis. But thanks to support from Anglican Aid, Tirat was seen by an eye care team sent to his village by the Victoria Memorial Medical Centre. He was referred for crucial surgery. With his vision successfully restored, Tirat is able to work again and provide for his family.

There are dozens of success stories like Tarat's emerging from the outskirts of Pakistan, but Anglican Aid needs your help for this work to continue. Please head to anglicanaid.org.au forward slash AnglicanAid.

and make a tax-deductible donation to help this wonderful organisation give people like Turat a second chance. That's anglicanaid.org.au forward slash Undeceptions.

The United States and its international partners presented the long-awaited roadmap to peace in the Middle East yesterday. They delivered it to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and the new Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas, also known as Abu Mazan. The plan is intended to be a phase-by-phase route to ending conflict and leading to a full Palestinian state as early as the year 2005. There are already signs that the road to peace will not be easy. A suicide bomber killed three Israelis in Tel Aviv yesterday.

Interpreting the book of Revelation in a concrete way instead of as apocalyptic literature has led people down some rather involved sidetracks. We dealt with this a bit in our episode called World's End, episode 34, with Richard Borkham and Alyssa Wilkinson.

The notion of Christians getting raptured from the earth before Jesus returns gets a good run in that episode. But another recent sidetrack that partly relies on the book of Revelation is Christian Zionism. This is a melding of biblical prophecies about Israel in the Old Testament and the book of Revelation with contemporary political support for the state of Israel.

This is a view that usually sits within what's called dispensationalist theology. That's the theory that God's plans in the world are unfolding in discrete, knowable periods and that each period has its own particular way of relating to God.

Often, dispensationalists believe that the age of the church climaxes in the restoration of the nation of Israel just before the return of Christ and the new dispensation that will then begin. So, the fate of Israel is often very important within this perspective.

We just listened to a news clip from Charlie Rose in 2003, 20 years ago, reporting on the so-called Roadmap to Peace. It was a plan backed by the U.S. Bush administration to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict and create an independent Palestinian state living side by side with Israel.

At the time, an influential group of Christian Zionists protested the plan, urging President Bush to walk away from the negotiating table.

The massively popular televangelist Jerry Falwell wrote at the time, quote, "To stand against Israel is to stand against God. We believe that history and scripture prove that God deals with nations in relation to how they deal with Israel."

Falwell was a proponent of a view that's still popular in the US, namely that Christians must support the modern state of Israel, not just for socio-political reasons, but because the Jews remain the chosen people of God, and much of God's plans for the Christian church and for the return of Christ depend on the stability of the state of Israel.

So the creation of the state of Israel in 1948 was seen as the fulfillment of biblical prophecy, getting ready for the final events of the book of Revelation, the battle of Armageddon, the rapture, which isn't there in Revelation, the return of Christ and so on.

When the Roadmap to Peace was released, Christian Zionists paid for a massive billboard campaign across America with messages like this one plastered all over the country. Ready? "And the Lord said to Jacob, 'Unto thy offspring will I give this land. Pray that President Bush honors God's covenant with Israel. Call the White House with this message."

The roadmap to peace was eventually shelved, mainly for political reasons, but this kind of theology was hovering in the background and probably did have some impact on the politics.

Christian Zionism remains prominent among US evangelicals, which is a huge part of the population here in America. In a 2015 LifeWay poll, 73% of evangelicals said events in Israel are prophesied in the book of Revelation. Scott McKnight himself was raised in that context.

I grew up with the idea that America was favored by God because we favored Israel, and Israel was to be favored because they became a nation again in 1948. And that's a fulfillment of prophecy of the book of Revelation.

It was just we saw ourselves as the United States, as one of God's favored nations because we were with Israel. And before long, it was Russia, our enemy, so-called, becomes the enemy of God, becomes the enemy of Israel. And I grew up with this. We heard a lot about this. And my youth pastor was particularly skilled at finding hidden things in the book of Revelation that no one else had ever seen. Ever.

Every one of those people were wrong. Scott McKnight says we can break up interpretations of Revelation into four basic categories. There are the preterists. They read Revelation as written to first century churches about first century topics.

Then there are the historicists. They read Revelation as a sketch of the history of the church from the first century until the end. And futurists think of Revelation as totally or nearly entirely about the future. This is where all the speculators tend to sit. And idealists, they read Revelation as timeless images and truths about God, the church, the state, and God's plan for the world.

Idealists would be like people who read fiction, C.S. Lewis, etc., and see in it ideal types of governments and Christians and unbelievers in tension with one another, seeking to do God's will so that it becomes a timeless vision for all times in the history of the church. But this is complicated by the fact that it's a response to

to the futurists who think that it is actually predicting specific things. The idealist says, no, it's not specific. So there's always, you know, like John says in 1 John, there are many antichrists. Now that is an interesting statement. So there's not just one antichrist. We're not looking to ask, is Putin the one? We're asking, does Putin fit the bill? So would you be a historicist idealist?

You know, I told a friend of mine, he called me a preterist. And I said to him, you know, I don't want to be locked into that category because I see the book as a theopolitical hermeneutic. So let me explain that. I think the book is teaching discipleship to real Christians in the first century on how to respond to empire and tyranny and how to follow Jesus faithfully in a world that is opposed to it.

You wrote, and I'm going to quote you, that Revelation is not about prediction of the future, so we can rule out the futurists, not about the future, but perception and interrogation of the present. It provides readers with a new lens to view our contemporary world. So that's really at the heart of how you approach the book. Can you give us a few sentences on what you mean by this new lens, as opposed to reading it as prediction?

First century Christians, Western Asia Minor, what we would call Western Turkey today, major cities, most of them major cities, are asking the question, how do we live as followers of Jesus when everything in the world is an alternative reality? I mean...

The Roman reality is, for them, an alternative reality. It's the one they don't want to live in. But they live in the Roman reality, and they want to know how to live. And I think John is trying to teach the disciples of Jesus, followers of Jesus, the Christians in Western Asia Minor, how to detect reality.

the evils of empire as they begin to make impact in the church and begin to make them accommodate themselves to that way of life. So John gives them like a template, a blueprint of discernment on how to recognize Babylon in the world today. I mean, he doesn't even call it Rome. He calls it Babylon. The city with seven hills, that's kind of giving it away.

But let's say it's Babylon. So he sketches Babylon. He waits till chapter 17 to start doing this with full clarity. But already when he's writing to the churches in chapters 2 and 3 of the book of Revelation,

He's beginning to show that Babylon, the sinful vices of Babylon, are already beginning to show up in these churches, and he wants them to recognize that. So I say that John is teaching a discipleship of double dissidents. They have to be dissident against corruption in the church and dissident against the corruptions of empire. This was my next question, to unpack the theme of being a dissident.

as you understand it in the book of Revelation? Well, John, this is something that I believe the dispensationalists and Christian pastors failed the American church in the 20th century in really bad ways, is that we became so convinced of political parties and the solution to America being in Washington, D.C., that

Christians were not taught a proper level of discernment of political corruptions. So in my, you know, I communicate publicly quite often in the Substack or blogs, whatever. And if I say one thing negative about Joe Biden, or if I said one thing wrong about Donald Trump, people would accuse me of being a member of the opposing party. This is the one thing that I think the church has failed in, in the 20th century.

I want independence from political party. I want to be able to say, President Biden did this well, but he did this poorly. President Trump, I won't go there. President Reagan did this well, but he also did this poorly. We need to maintain distance from political partisanship

And discipleship requires discernment of this. And if we get trapped into political parties, we almost surrender. It becomes idolatrous. We surrender our allegiance to a political process rather than to the Lamb. Jesus teaches, the book of Revelation teaches, that the way of the Lamb is

is the way of the follower of the Lamb. And they are to live faithfully to Jesus, no matter what that costs them in their political environment and in the cities of Western Asia Minor. So a dissident is someone who says, this is the way of Rome and we're not going to live that way.

This is the way of Babylon, and we're not going to act like that. We're not going to worship their gods. We're not going to surrender ourselves to their money. We're not going to surrender ourselves to their military complex. We are going to follow the Lamb regardless of what it costs us in this world.

A particular kind of Christian listening might say, Scott McKnight, come on, you're just a lefty. We can see it. And obviously John, in his context, could never have imagined Christians being invited to share power. He couldn't have imagined four centuries later. And so that's where that book is coming from. But now we are in a situation where we've been invited to

to share power, and you're telling us to be apolitical? I wouldn't say we're apolitical. I would say that we need to maintain...

an independence, so that we can be political for the things that we think are good and right and just and be anti-political for the things that we think are unjust, right? So there are things that I can support and things that I can't. But if I become a political partisan,

I cannot be critical of my party without getting myself in trouble. So I can be accused by one group as a lefty and another group by a righty. And I have had that happen to me. There's enough speculation about Revelation to last a lifetime. But one thing is pretty clear throughout the book. So I had to ask Scott about it. The fire and brimstone judgment.

I have a final question for you that really comes from more the perspective of someone who's not a believer. How do you reconcile the seemingly violent and vengeful depictions of God in the book of Revelation with the love and mercy and forgiveness obviously found elsewhere in the New Testament?

This is the hardest part of the book of Revelation for me. I wasn't willing to go public with write about it until I had a little bit, what I thought, a little bit more satisfactory solution. I don't think I will ever be fully satisfied with any solution. There are some very gruesome scenes in the book of Revelation of battles.

Revelation 16:2-4

There was a great earthquake. The sun turned black like sackcloth made of goat hair. The whole moon turned blood red, and the stars in the sky fell to earth as figs drop from a fig tree when shaken by a strong wind. The heavens receded like a scroll being rolled up, and every mountain and island was removed from its place.

Revelation 6:12-17

I'm happier with the idea. I'm more settled with the idea that this is fiction, and this is the way a first-century Jewish Christian apocalyptic typewriter would describe the victory of God in this world. I would not use that language today. But that was the way they talked, and we have to appreciate that.

That's how things were done in that world. And that was the way of describing victory. I am not terribly bothered by violence in the Chronicles of Narnia or the Lord of the Rings. It's there. It's fiction.

It's describing victory of the right things over the bad things. And sometimes it's the victory of bad things over good things. I think that helps me understand the book of Revelation and not turn it into some earthbound bloodbath in Armageddon, where there's almost a schadenfreude, a delight in...

some foreign country being trounced by Israel and everybody being murdered and slaughtered, blood up to a horse's bridle in the valley. I mean, come on, you've been there. You know, there's enough leaks in those valleys that nothing is ever going to get very high. So, I mean, I remember going there the first time I thought, yeah, well, that can't be literal. There's too many rivers going out of those valleys. So,

I'm bothered by the violence. I'm also bothered a little bit by the use of a woman as a trope for Babylon. And yet it's paired with the beautiful woman. Yeah. But I think that I'm pretty happy, pretty settled with the idea that it's fiction and that it is describing something that has redemptive value, even though it uses language that I wouldn't use today. Yeah. Yeah.

I was wondering, and maybe you can just respond to this as an idea, that whether it's even subversive at the literary level in that it's taking Roman violence language, Roman conquering, bloodthirsty conquering language, and subverting it.

to say that actually we use this imagery of Roman violence, but it's actually a picture of what is true victory in the book of Revelation, and that is martyrdom. Yes. So in a way, it's actually subverting violence by using violent language. I'm wondering whether it uses that language to upend it. Just as you mentioned earlier, and this is where I thought you were going to go, you said, and then I saw a lion, the Lion of Judah, and it was a lamb.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. As if that's the interpretive key. And I agree with that totally. It's a morphing. But I mean, even with the battle scenes that are pretty gruesome, late in the book of Revelation, the victory is by the word that comes from the mouth.

And, of course, the robes are stained with blood, but could that be the redemptive blood that brings a different pattern? But clearly, the book of Revelation is not urging people to pick up swords and to go to battle. It's telling you go to battle when you go out there and you witness, and you go to battle when you worship the Lamb. And die. Yes, and subvert.

Let's press pause. I've got a five-minute Jesus for you.

When I first became a Christian as a 16-year-old with no church background, I pictured God's judgment purely in terms of personal morality, as if God were the strict schoolmaster and we were the naughty children skipping class and back-chatting to teachers. It was probably a reason I thought of things that way.

But this morality paradigm has the potential to blind us to a more basic perspective on judgment found throughout Christian scripture in the Old and the New Testament. Judgment is about putting things right. It's about overthrowing what is wrong with the world and establishing the good. So God is not to be thought of as the strict schoolmaster looking out for naughty children and ensuring we all keep his rules.

He's more like the heroic justice commissioner who vows to root out corruption, expose all abuses of power, and bring all tyrants down from their thrones. This justice paradigm is stated perfectly in the description of the future Messiah that's found in the foundational prophecy of Isaiah chapter 11, written 700 years before Christ. It goes like this.

Remember that image, won't you? A weapon out of his mouth.

Overthrowing evil and establishing justice and peace is the main business of the divinely appointed judge, the Messiah. And Jesus himself is cast throughout the New Testament as fulfilling this role. In passage after passage we hear about Jesus as the judge. Jesus himself said he was the judge.

I mean, here's Matthew 25: "When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, he will sit on his glorious throne; all nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate the people one from another, as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. He will put the sheep on his right and the goats on his left."

Then the passage says he blesses those on his right. And then we read,

You did not do for me.

judgment on those who ignored justice, goodness and compassion. Which brings us to the book of Revelation, which takes this same idea of Christ as the judge from Isaiah 11 and from Jesus' own teachings and then puts it in apocalyptic style.

The New Testament's most frightening chapter about divine judgment is Revelation 18. It's all about the downfall of the archetypal wealthy oppressor, the opulent, demagogic, tyrannical Babylon, which is clearly code for Rome. Here it is.

And then comes the description of Jesus himself. Revelation 19.

Verse 2.

He is dressed in a robe dipped in blood, and his name is the word of God. The armies of heaven were following him, riding on white horses and dressed in fine linen, white and clean. Out of his mouth comes a sharp sword with which to strike down the nations. He will rule them with an iron scepter. He treads the winepress of the fury of the wrath of God Almighty."

It's bracing stuff. And notice there's that weapon coming out of his mouth, which is also mentioned in Isaiah. It's the weapon of his simple word, bringing down the tyrants and lifting up the vulnerable. Viewed this way, the biblical threat of judgment isn't a theological scare tactic designed to make us more religious.

It's a pledge to oppressed humanity that the Creator hears their cries for justice and will one day bring his justice to bear on every act of oppression. God's judgment and compassion then are two sides of the one coin. It's because God loved the unnumbered martyrs of the first century that he will bring the tyrannous Roman perpetrators to judgment.

It's because he loves the downtrodden millions today in Africa, Asia and elsewhere that he will bring to justice developing world despots and neglectful materialists. The longing through the ages that God would do something about the violence, the greed and the corruptions of human history will be satisfied on the day of judgment as victims and perpetrators experience no more and no less than is their due.

Despite all the speculation about end times, the book of Revelation, inspired by the Old Testament and Jesus himself, is perfectly clear that love, mercy, and the justice of God will win. You can press play now. So thinking of my listener who doesn't believe in Christianity, and I have a few of them, what is there in the book of Revelation for them? Well, if they like a good apocalyptic battle story, if they like

Lord of the Rings, I think Harry Potter. If they like the divine comedy of our great author in Italy, I think you can like the book of Revelation as a story of the victory of good over evil, of the oppressed winning eventually over the oppressors.

of injustices overcome by justice. And then you see the great vision in the New Jerusalem where, you know, I think one of the great little snippets is they never have to close the gates.

And it's safe. It's safe to be in this place. And everybody will have what they need. And all the exploitation of goods and resources and money and clothing and food, etc., will come to the city of God. And all the people will be able to have all that they need. And those are great visions, right?

But if you're a little sensitive about some wars, you know, some battle scenes, you know, it's going to be there. But I like a good battle when it turns out the right way. Isn't that the tension of a good narrative?

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Undeceptions is hosted by me, John Dixon, produced by Kayleigh Payne and directed by Mark Tenhorns Hadley, as he's known around the office. Sophie Hawkshaw is on socials and membership. Alistair Belling is a writer and researcher. Siobhan McGuinness is our online librarian. Lindy Leveston remains my wonderful assistant.

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Ugly monkey. I can say that at this safe distance, can't I?