I’m re-reading Revelation and all of the interpretive schemes and crutches I’ve used in the past seem completely inadequate. The book is bigger and weirder than the theological decoder rings I’ve used to try and bring it into focus. So I’m searching for a new one. I need an appropriate frame through which to view the book in a way that makes sense.
What if Revelation is less about time and more about perspective? What if it’s not about the future of the world so much as about a view of the early church ~ her problems and frustrations; her relations with the surrounding culture and with the ruling empire ~ from a new and dramatically different perspective where high is low, crooked is straight and bumpy is flat? Maybe it’s a crazy apocalyptic case study in applied gospel. As the apostle’s creativity ripened, maybe he felt too old and the stakes too high to rely further on prose or epistle or even on testimonial. Maybe his starting point, prompted by the visions of Patmos, was to demonstrate the logical conclusions of gospel and epistle in a real place – here – at a real time – now. How would that look? How would it be?
And Revelation is his answer. “It would be like this!” It would be heavily weird, surreal and other-worldly because every life, seen from the perspective of angels and demons and God would look surreal and other-worldly to mortal earthbound creatures. We may not recognize ourselves at all if we could view our lives from outside our own perspective; if our eyes were open to the realities of spirit and an animated cosmos.
Revelation makes the plodding journey of poor wayfaring strangers into science fiction extravaganzas full of plot, drama and tension; soaring highs and plummeting lows; heart-stopping, monstrous and bizarre. Revelation is like a snapshot, no, like a 3D HD IMAX vision of real life seen, for the first time, by those who have been deaf, mute and blind.