The Book of Revelation Is Not About the Future

Welcome to Expanding Your Faith, a podcast that tackles modern-day issues with a focus on spirituality, with Bishop Greer Godsey, Reverend Mark Trim, and Bishop Ben Williams. Thanks for listening. Take a breath, open your heart, and let's expand your faith together. Welcome to this edition of Expanding Your Faith. I'm Bishop Greer, and joining me tonight is Bishop Ben. Greetings, everybody. Reverend Mark is still on vacation. He'll be joining us again next week for our podcast. Hope he's having a good time and relaxing during his vacation. Tonight we're going to talk about one of the most misunderstood and misquoted and misused books of the Bible, the book of Revelation. And it is probably the hardest book for people to wrap their minds around. It has also led to a multi-million dollar industry built on fear of the future, of faith, of Christianity, of the world. And so we're going to look at some of these things and kind of try to dispel some of the myths tonight, as well. Before we get started, a reminder, you can always find our podcast, episodes at podcasts.myocci.social, or on Apple Podcast, or wherever you find your podcast. Revelation may be the most quoted, most feared, and most misunderstood, book in the entire Bible. Most people think of the book of Revelation as a book about the Rapture, the Antichrist, the Mark of the Beast, a global tribulation, a countdown to the end of the world. All of it is more or less lifted directly from the left behind movies and novels, and a specific 19th and 20th century American theological movement. Not a historical movement about the book of Revelation. What Revelation is not, is not what, what Revelation is viewed today is not what the first readers understood it to be. And not what serious biblical scholarship across Catholicism, Orthodoxy, and most Protestant traditions hold today. We're going to try to recover what kind of book this actually is, who it's written for, where the popular end time mythology actually comes from historically, and what the book means for people living under empire and oppression right now, which turns out to be a much more urgent and useful question than when is the world going to end. So Bishop Ben, what are some of the things you have heard people say about the book of Revelation? Revelation? Oh, that's a, you know, that's an easy question. We're not really easy, but they can be multiple different directions. I think people would say, oh, it's about that being elevated by getting the heaven being raptured by the rapture. The good people are going to be taken and the best people can be left behind and not believers. I've heard all kinds of stories like, oh, you got to tell your property to give to the Lord, but the thing is, how are you going to get on it? But the biggest thing, the biggest thing is the methodology is what people get done understand. They have no idea that it's not a book of future events. Right. Understandable, because for most part, they've not been educated about it. Right. You know, and that's what is so sad about it. They've not been educated about with the book of Revelation, actually, means. And so we're going to look at what the book actually means and what it's all about. It's actually three genres in one. Scholars today widely agree, Revelation is not one simple genre, but a blend of three. A populartic, prophetic, and epistolory. It's literally a letter. John's letter to the seven churches that are in Asia. It has nothing to do with any future prophecy. And John actually says that at the very beginning of the book of Revelation is an overlooked passage by most Christians today. It's actually a piece of correspondence to actual congregations with actual names, experiencing actual problems that John is helping them address. It then moves on to apocalyptic vision and throughout uses prophetic language in the Old Testament sense, not primarily predicting the far future, but declaring God's judgment and hope into a present crisis, the way Amos or Jeremiah did. And we don't view Amos or Jeremiah as future prophetic voices, but rather they were a voice of prophecy for their day and time, addressing issues going on around them. And what does apocalyptic actually mean? Let me try to say that a little cleaner. I haven't so much trouble with some of these words tonight. Apologize. What does apocalyptic actually mean? The word apocalyptic simply means unveiling or revealing. It does not mean the end of the world in Greek. Despite how the English has used the word in popular culture, the Greek word simply means unveiling or revealing. literature was a well known genre in Judaism from roughly 200 BC to 280. Revelation was not written in a vacuum. Nothing else. Nothing even a modern day is written in a vacuum. It stands alongside works like the book of Daniel, the Jewish apocalyptic text such as first Enoch. You know, a lot of people ask us Bishop about the book of not. And Revelation is very much in that same genre with the book of Enoch. Correct. It is. And it's like the other books that I want people don't understand them because they miss they misinterpret how it's written to be correctly, but I don't speak ancient Greek or Hebrew. So it's kind of hard to understand the true context of what the book means. Right. people and people to assume. I'm sorry, assuming that the apocalyptic thing about zombies and the raising of the dead, you know, the walking dead werewolves and firefighters. And that has to do with the biblical story of what it truly means. Right. And this genre uses a lot of symbolic numbers, strange composite animals, cosmic battles, encoded imagery, not because the author is is trying to write a coded prediction manual for people 2000 years later, but because this was simply how oppressed communities under the Empire, the Roman Empire wrote to encourage each other without getting executed for it. As I've said over and over again, John wrote in code to the seven churches and Ephesus in Asia Minor so that his letters would get taken to them without being destroyed because he was speaking about things going on that day and time in the Empire. A key interpretive rule for the book of Revelation. You do not read poetry like a spreadsheet. You do not read apocalyptic vision like a newspaper headline. It's very wise. Right. It is. So the book is a tradition that is traditionally attributed to the Apostle John. Debate continues about whether it's the same John that wrote the Gospels, but there is a broad consensus on timing. The book was most likely written in the mid 90s, A.D. during the reign of the Roman Emperor Domitian. This was a real period of real pressure on early Christians in Asia Minor. All Empire wide violent persecution the way later legend imagined it, but very real local harassment, economic exclusion, pressure to participate in Empire worship. And for some communities, actual martyrdom. John himself says he is writing from exile on the island of Patmos. This is not a detached theologian writing a philosophical textbook. This is a pastor writing from banishment to churches that he loves, to churches that he was shepherding. He was their bishop. That's why he was writing to them. And so the question is then asked, who was he writing to? Well, he's clear in Revelations chapter two and three to name the seven real churches in Asia Minor. These writing to Ephesus, Smyrna, Pergamum, Dieteria, Sardis, Philadelphia, and Latidosia. And he speaks to each one specific local situations they were going through. Okay. Some were being persecuted. Some are compromising with the culture around them. Some have grown lukewarm and complicit. This is not a message parked in a time capsule for some future generation. It was a pastoral letter to specific struggling first century congregations. We need hope right now in their moment under this rule of the Empire. If Revelations original audience could not have understood it is being about the 21st century, but it was never primarily about the 21st century. And they would never have imagined it as being a book, a future prophecy. They would have rather they would have instead viewed it as a book for their day and time. And that's important. So, Bishop Ben, do you think that it being a pastoral local book and being written to a local audience changed the weight or tone that Revelations should bring to us as we read it? I think it does in a certain amount of weight of aspect. If you look at certain aspects of how it's supposed to be written in this context, but also we have to remember like you stated a while ago that it was created for the local congregation coming from its bishop, which was an exile. So we had to do that in the context, but there is connotations that we can use currently in our life now, too. But we have to remember that this is already a past event that already has happened. Right. Right. And we're going to look at what the original readers would have understood Revelations to mean as we go along. So we're going to get that information here very shortly. So where does the left behind theology actually come from? And a lot of it comes from assumptions that people never question. Most American Christians assume the rapture and the modern end time tagline have always been part of Christian belief, taught by the apostles, believed by the early church, part of historic Christian doctrines in Jesus. Yet that assumption is not true. The actual history is traceable, documentable, and surprisingly recent. John Nelson Darby was a 19th century Anglo-Irish minister, born in the 1800s, who became a central figure in the Plymouth brother movement in England and Ireland. In the 1830s, Darby began teaching a new system for reading the Bible called dispensationalism. The idea that history is divided into distinct ages or dispensations and that biblical prophecy about Israel and the church must be kept in entirely separate, literal, future-oriented tracks. Out of this system, the doctrine of pre-tribulation rapture, the belief that believers will be secretly and suddenly removed from the earth before a seven-year period of tribulation, followed by a visible return of Christ was developed. It is not ancient doctrine. Darby is widely regarded, including within the Plymouth brotherhood's own historical self-description, as the originator of this specific teaching in the 1830s. It does not appear in the early church fathers, the medieval church, or even the reformers. It is historically speaking a new invention less than 200 years old. Darby's systems stayed relatively contained in Britain and among the Plymouth brother until American lawyer and Bible teacher named Cyrus Ingerson Schofield published the Schofield Reference Bible in 1909. The Schofield Reference Bible embedded Darby's dispensationalism framework directly into the study notes, printed alongside the biblical text itself. For millions of readers, that meant Darby's 19th-century interpretation system got physically bound into their Bibles, page after page, as if it were simply what the text said. Schofield Bible went on to be one of the best-selling books Oxford University Press had ever published, and it shaped the theological imagination of American evangelicals for nearly the entire 20th century. The prophecy conference movement and Bible institution movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries spread this framework further until it became for many Americans, Christians, simply with the Bible teachers with no awareness that it was a specific, traceable, relatively recent theological invention. to my favorite portion of the topic, people like Hal Lindsey and Left Behind. Right. I have to pause for just a second and take a drink. I'm sorry. You know, what you're taking at Greenfield, it's amazing on how many things topics from the TV shows from Left Behind, the Paul Lindsey thing, even in the Christian bookstores, Life Wave was making big profits off of the End Times in the book of Revelation. Right, absolutely. And Hal Lindsey comes on the scene with this dispensational framework that he put into play in the late Great Planet Earth in the 1970s, while the best-selling nonfiction books of that decade, which read current geopolitical events directly into Revelation's symbolism. He later produced the Left Behind novel series by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins in beginning in 1995, which sold tens of millions of copies and more than any theological textbook shaped how ordinary Americans now picture the End Times. Right. I'm sure many of you have watched the Left Behind movies or read the books. The popular imagination of Revelations, most people carry around today, today, is not a first century Christian theology. It is a 19th century British theological innovation, mainstream by a 20th century American study Bible and dramatized by late 20th century pop fiction. So how have you been encountered this dispensationalist teaching or the Left Behind culture in either your upbringing or your current ministry? I remember when I was a kid, even in the Baptist church taught the book of Revelation and the rapture was going to happen. It was coming. The pastor always got on the platform. It's coming. It's going to happen. And then as I got a little bit older, I started questioning. And as people know my history, I was half Baptist Catholic on Sunday and Saturday, Saturday for Catholic. So the Catholic church would say one thing and the Baptist would say another thing. I'm doing my ministry now and I have been for the last 25 plus years that people have always said, well, Father, how does that play into into the life now? Well, it doesn't because the rapture and all that stuff has already happened. It's not going to happen. We're not Jesus and not coming back again. Right. Not in that way. Yeah. Right. Right. The idea of rapture, of course, being created by John Darby in 1830. know, it is not a historical view of the church. You know, the rapture was part of that dispensationalist, Dr. and Darby created. So why does this matter theologically, not just historically? It misreads the text and takes history out of the text. Right. All right. When we misread it. Revelation one one opens by saying it concerns things that must soon take place. And in chapter one, verse three pronounces blessings on those who hear it because the time is near language that makes far more sense addressing the first century believers under the Roman Empire than it does a 21st century audience 2000 years ago. years removed. The seven have it had a beast imagery of empire, the new, neurologic, numerological symbolism throughout the book, like the number 666. Connect clearly to first century, first century Roman imperial figures and institutions. The number of the beast in Revelation 13, 666, for instance, is widely understood by scholars using the ancient Hebrew practice of assigning numeric, numeric value to numbers to point towards emperor Nero, not a future king or president or whoever. They were directly referring to emperor Nero. And the Jewish turned Christian readers of this text in Asia minor would have understood Hebrew numerology and would have been able to say, oh, this is what he's talking about. Reading these images as codes for the 21st century nations, currencies or technologies requires ignoring that they are clearly meant for first century audiences. And there's something important that gets lost when we read this book, the book of Revelation. as a book of future prophecy. If Revelation is primarily a puzzle to be solved about our future, then it's central pastoral message that God is faithful to the suffering and that empire does not have the final word gets replaced by speculation, beer, and a strange kind of morbid fascination, almost like that fascination of you know, watching a train wreck or, you know, rubbernecking for a car wreck. The left behind approach often produces a passive, escapist posture. The world's going to get worse. We are waiting to be taken out of it. So why invest deeply in justice and creation in our neighbors and life at all? And I actually have had so many Christians during my ministry say to me, why are you worrying about the poor? Why are you trying to lobby for justice and peace? We're not going to be here in another 10, 15, 20 years. Okay. So in other words, instead of following Jesus's command to be busy and about the work of the kingdom, they ignore it in order to sit back and be lazy and just wait for the rapture. Okay. Sorry. Go ahead. I'll go say, you know, you think that we administer the handling today's problems like hunger, immigration issues, social justice issues, if they're worrying about the rapture, we should be more concerned about today. Right. Because today is more important because the state of the rapture does happen. Okay. That's like the parable of the talents. Right. You're burying your talent instead of doing what you're supposed to. Right. And I think that a lot of Christians cannot seem to get it through their skulls. There is nothing in revelations that talks about Jesus returning in physical form. Right. All of what revelations is talking about is Jesus alive in the community through following his teachings, through doing what they're called to do through the gospel, not a return to earth. So there is no concept of Jesus returning physically in revelations. It's just not there. And the posture of ignoring the world around us is ironically the opposite of revelations. First readers needed in the opposite of what the text itself was trying to do. Catholic Orthodox and mainline, many mainline Protestant traditions have historically read revelations symbolically and pastorally, rather than with a predictive timeline in view, emphasizing Christ's ultimate victory over evil already accomplished in the cross and resurrection, rather than a coded future itinerary. This is not a modern liberal accommodation. It reflects a much older and more historically grounded reading than the 19th century dispensationalist movement. that most Americans assume is the default, the John Darby philosophy. And that's where we get that lazy notion of just sit around and wait for Jesus to come back. Right. Again, it started in 1830. Before 1830, no Christian faith denominations or teachers believe revelations to be a book of future prophecy intent to make you sit back and just ignore what's going on in the world in the hopes that Jesus would return and take us all away. And I call that Christian escapism. That philosophy that we don't have to worry about our neighbor, we don't have to worry about what's going on around us because Jesus is going to eventually come back and take us away from here is escapist. Right. Jesus taught Jesus didn't teach us to just escape what's going on in the world, but rather to be part of the world in the form of changing and transforming and making the world a better place. So escapist philosophy defeats the gospel purpose. Go ahead, Bishop. And I'm sorry for interrupting, but this is the way we talk about the past shows faith in action is important. Right. We need to have faith in action. action. And we're just going to sit and say, we're Christian, but don't show Christian actions and do Christian works. Then we're, then we're not going to accomplish what God wants us to do. And the statement that he gave us, no matter if we're clergy or we're laypeople, it doesn't make a difference. That is so very true. That's so very true. And I know that there are going to be people who listen to this podcast. Who are going to absolutely ignore everything we've said about revelation, not being a book of future prophecy. They're going to want to hold on to that because escapism is comforting. The idea that Jesus will come and take us away from here and we won't have to do anything. We won't have to be part of the world around us. We won't have to be part of the world around us. to work to make a better place right here on earth is comforting. Right. So they're using the escapism just to make it easier for people to understand what it means. They're using it like a security blanket or a weighted blanket saying, well, hey, I can cover myself up and hide. And I'm sorry about it. It's like a security blanket for them. That's absolutely correct. We should. see what concerns me is today's modern society. I know I'm getting a little bit ahead of myself, but what concerns me is people use the book of revelations for other things besides the rapture. That's right. They use it for their agendas. Look at today's look where we are now. Right. Right. So what revelation actually means for people under empire right now? The book was written to the oppressed, not about them. Revelation was written by an exile pastor to marginalize harassed, economically pressured religious minorities living inside one of the most powerful empires on earth. It's central claim is not Here is a secret code about the future, but the empire that looks all powerful right now is not actually the final word and the lamb who was slain is on the throne, not Caesar. Revelation 13's beast rising from the sea and demanding worship is a direct. Benlyville critique of the Roman imperial cult, which required participation in emperor worship for full economic and social life. Okay. The refusal to worship the beast in revelation is a refusal to grant ultimate allegiance to any empire, any political order or any economic system that demands what belongs only to God. Babylon, which is mentioned quite a bit in Revelation is a living critique of empire, not a future nation. Revelation 17 and 18 describes the fall of Babylon, the great almost universally understood by scholars as coded language for Rome itself. It's wealth. It's trade networks. It's military power and its seduction of the nations into complicity with its violence and its success. The judgment pronounced on Babylon and Revelation 18 is fundamentally an economic and political indictment. The merchants weep because no one buys their cargo anymore. Cargo that revelation explicitly names as including human bodies and souls. This is not a prediction about a specific nation centuries in the future. It is a theological verdict on what empire always does when left unchecked. It accommodates human or it caught, modifies human beings, demands ultimate loyalty and calls its own violence piece. We see that happening even today in our world. That's just what empires do. And so what does that mean for us and those of us who live under empires today? and face injustice today. The relevant question Revelation asks is not when will this happen? But what does it look like to remain faithful, honest and hopeful while living inside a political and economic system that demands more allegiance than belongs to it? For immigration for immigrant communities facing hostile policies for LGBTQIA plus individuals facing legislative targeting for the poor facing systems that treat them as expendable. Revelations original message applies directly. The empires claim to have the final say is a lie and the slaying lamb, not the beast, sits on the throne. And Revelations 21's vision of the New Jerusalem, a city where God dwells with humanity. where every tear is wiped away, where there is no more death or mourning or pain is not a bribe to endure passively until evacuation. It is a vision meant to fuel active hope and active resistance to every present injustice because it declares what God's ultimate intention for creation actually is that we live in harmony with God. Revelation is a book of resistance, not escapism. Read this way. Revelation stands alongside the prophetic traditions demands for justice rather than apart from it. It is not a strange add on to the Bible's ethical vision, but is a climatic statement of it. The call of revelation is not wait quietly to be rescued from the world, but worship rightly. refuse the idols of empire and hold on to hope even when empire looks invincible. This is a profoundly different posture than passive in time spectatorship. It is an active, costly, faithful stance available to every generation living under unjust power, including our own. So, what does this reframing of revelation mean pastorally for people in their own congregation who are living under real pressure right now, Bishop? Well, it really truly affects the marginalized community because if you look at it, the current administration that we live under here in the US and speaking specifically for us because we're in the US, it affects us because they're making draconian laws, relations against marginalized people, they're a dbtq. And they're using the project 25, which is based on book revelation, possible revelation to affect these kind of changes and stuff. So it does, it does affect us in our modern life. It doesn't refer us to the second coming, but it does affect us in the sense of it like being like the current administration being the emperor. Right, nobody else's, that makes sense. Absolutely, that makes perfect sense, Bishop. So as we recap, revelation is a pastoral letter wrapped in apocalyptic vision, written to a first century churches under real imperial pressure, not a coded predictive timeline for the 21st century. The rapture and modern end time mythology, most people assume as ancient Christian doctrine is historically a traceable 19th century invention, popularized through a specific study Bible and later dramatized into popular fiction. But revelation actually offers is not a countdown clock, but a summons to resist empire false claim to ultimate authority. And a promise that God's justice and presence, not human power, will have the final word. If this reframing challenges something you were taught to fear, that's all right. Faith can survive an honest look at its own history, or I'm sorry. If this reframing challenges something you were taught to fear, that is all right. Faith can survive an honest look at its own history is stronger, not weaker for it. Bishop Ben, I want to give you an opportunity to have some final words. Well, you know, we were talking about the revelations and the book. I like everybody to focus on what's currently happening now, not with what the book was meant. foreign back in the first century, we're not in the first century, we're living in now, now, we're living today. So what we need to focus on is not hiding as Christians. We need to be focusing on putting our works out in the public across the world, not only in the US, but across the world, helping those helping those that are marginalized, helping those that are hungry, helping those that are having injustices like the LGBTQ, the people of color, etc. Anybody needs help, they reached out to say, can you help me help your neighbor? And we're going to be good Christians. We have to help. And one of our priests said it best. If you're going to be a shepherd, you have to be waiting to get dirty and smell like the sheep. That's absolutely correct. 100%. And I couldn't say it any better than that. So that's going to be my final word to you. Now, one closing thing is how many of us, and I said that a couple of podcasts back, how many of us are going to truly recognize Jesus that he walked into our church today? Can you truly recognize him? Food for thought for next time. Excellent. And thank you, Bishop. Thank you for having me. I appreciate it. So glad to have Bishop with us again tonight. I'm glad that he is feeling much better now. And yes, next week, we look forward to Reverend Mark Trim. returning from vacation to join us. Next week's podcast topic, we are having part two of the Rita's Manifesto with Padre Ricardo Romero, who will give us a more in depth look at what the Rita's Manifesto is. So that will be next Saturday's podcast. As always, you can reach out to me at Bishop God see at my OCCI.org or by visiting our St. Francis.org. If you'd like to listen to past editions of "Spending Your Faith" that are available at podcasts, that's podcasts with an S at the end, dot my OCCI dot social, or on Apple Podcast or wherever you find your fine podcast at. We're live every Saturday night at 830 p.m. Eastern time on younow.com forward slash Bishop Greg and at TikTok at expanding your faith. Until next time, when we once again attempt to expand your faith, keep shining bright, my friends. Thanks for spending this time with us on expanding your faith. If today's conversation encouraged you, share the episode. It helps more people find the show. You can listen wherever you get your podcasts and you can also find us online at podcasts dot my OCCI dot social and our St. Francis dot org. Follow us on Facebook at expanding your faith. Our producer is Bishop Ben Williams. will reach ministry of St. Francis Parish and outreach in Augusta, Georgia. Produced in cooperation with the Metropolitan Community Church of our Redeemer in Augusta, Georgia. Until next time, keep expanding your faith.