This Fall I will be facilitating a Men’s Group on Tuesday mornings at Amelia Plantation Chapel, studying the last book of the Bible, Revelation. We will be meeting in the Library of the Chapel at 10.30 a.m. All men who are interested are welcome to attend. To pique interest I am posting an informative introduction by Ian Paul.

The book of Revelation is the most remarkable text you will ever read. It is one of the most extraordinary pieces of literature ever written by a human being, and it ought to feature in any university course on world literature. Its engagement with the canonical Old Testament Scriptures, its use fo contemporary first-century culture and mythology, its elaborate structure and multiple echoes, interweaving, repetition and development of themes, its extraordinary sophisticated use of numerology in three different ways, and the sheer power of its rhetoric and impact of its imagery – all these make it a remarkable and endlessly fascinating text. Outside of the Christian Scriptures there really is nothing in all human literature to compare with it.

The nature of this text is reflected in the impact that it has had on human history, belief and culture. At a popular level, it is hard to escape the pervasive influence of its imagery, all of which is unique in the New Testament. There is hardly a day goes by without some mention of Armageddon (16:16) as a metaphor for a cataclysmic event involving conflict, and the first word of the text ‘apocalypse’, has not only become the descriptor for a whole genre of literature from the period, but serves as a common expression for any kind of impending disaster. Images of people seated on clouds and playing harps (14:2,14) have entered the public consciousness, becoming a visual metaphor for anything thought to be ‘heavenly’, even in television advertisements. Disasters that include warfare, famine or disease are identified with the ‘four horsemen of the apocalypse’ (6:1-8); we all know that to enter heaven we must pass St. Peter who is standing at the ‘pearly gates’ (21:21); and everyone is wary of the ‘number of the beast’ (13:18). We might them add ‘Jezebel’ (2:20), being ‘lukewarm’ (3:16), the ‘grapes of wrath’ (14:19), a ‘scarlet woman’ (17:3) and ‘streets paved with gold’ (21:21) – the list goes on.

Revelation is the most developed example of a writer in Scripture wrestling with the ideological implications of the gospel, and engaging with an opposing ideological system in the light of what God has done for us in Jesus, as shaped by the inspiration of the Spirit. The near-universal decline in church attendance in the West is a sign that, like the Christians in Saris, Western Christians have been caught napping: the ideological climate has shifted dramatically in the last generation or two, and we have been so complacent and content with a ‘Christendom’ model of society that we haven’t known how to respond. Whilst Christians in other parts of the world have not experienced this, globalization and the spread of economic wealth could see the same thing happen elsewhere in the next generation. Revelation shows us very clearly how to be alert to the context we are in and how to both engage with and stand up to the pressure of ideology, and it gives us the resources to live courageously in an inhospitable climate.

(Ian Paul, Revelation, TNTC, 1-3)