Proclamation without a sense of mission
Yet another repudiation of a nice, humanitarian basis for nonviolence, this time from the New Testament itself. John’s Apocalypse is arguably the most emphatic argument in the New Testament for Christians to forswear violence; its whole politico-cosmic dualism is premised on the idea that it is Babylon who wields the sword and kills senselessly, whereas Christ the slain lamb and his followers wield only the sword of the Word of God. So “let anyone who has an ear listen: if you are taken captive into captivity you go; if you kill with the sword, with the sword you must be killed. Here is a call for the endurance and faith of the saints” (13:9–10). But the Christian refusal to kill, on John’s account, has not the slightest bit to do with “the intrinsic dignity of human life” or anything of the sort. Christians prefer being killed to killing because so did Jesus, and the rest of the world (quite literally) can go to hell. “In any case,” writes Richard Hays, “we find no trace Revelation of an imperative to love the enemy. The boundaries between the church and the world are sharply defined and absolute; the enemy, within this symbolic world, is portrayed simply as demonic” (Moral Vision of the New Testament, p. 182).
It’s an interesting tension (or possibly an inconsistency) that this book places so much emphasis on the church’s proclamation and so little on the church’s mission (in the sense that mission always maintains the hope of actually winning some new disciples).
23 February 2009 |
Comments (6)
Tags: Ecclesiology, Missions, New Testament, Peace, Revelation, Violence
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I don’t really have a substantive comment to make, but it is Interesting to see your comments here as I was just cruising through Oliver O’Donovan’s essay “The Political Thought of the Book of Revelation” from the Tyndale Bulletin, 1986.
http://www.tyndalehouse.com/tynbul/library/TynBull19863704ODonovan_PoliticalThoughtInRevelation.pdf
‘Christians prefer being killed to killing because Jesus did, and the rest of the world (quite literally) can go to hell.’
I’m having trouble hearing the unity of this idea. Jesus was killed and the rest of the world can go to hell?
The captive/captivity and kill/be killed dichotomy sounds like an older understanding of justice that Jesus so radically re-framed. I have always struggled to read Revelation in the light of what I see of Jesus, and this short excerpt doesn’t help. So we aren’t called to love the demonic enemy; does humanitarian nonviolence run contrary to that?
(sorry, I’m unfamiliar with html…I didn’t mean to strike that line out.)
I’m on board with your reticence here, Greta, but here’s the paradox that struck me on my most recent reading of Revelation:
The idea that Jesus “radically re-framed” our concept of justice isn’t foreign to Revelation, I don’t think; certainly it’s because of Jesus the slain lamb that we know that true power lies hidden in suffering, not in violence. But those who refuse to acknowledge this reorientation of history, according to this author, are spit out and destroyed by God–at least, that seems to be the trajectory of the text! Honestly, I’m not sure what to do with all that, though I’m beginning to see why the fathers argued so much about whether or not to include it in the canon…
Hey Brian, I just found your blog and this was the first post I saw. It’s strange that Hays chooses the [in my opinion] less warranted translation “If anyone kills with the sword” instead of “If anyone is to be killed with the sword”. The manuscripts as well as the whole sense of the passage depend on “kill” being in the passive, I think.
It’s a manuscript difference, not a translation difference. Aland renders the parallelism with two passives, but this is (according to Hays) the minority tradition, and he regards it as a secondary correction. I don’t really know how to read the critical apparatus, but 3/5 of the alternatives Aland cites in the footnote (with quite a healthy number of physical examples) use the active verb instead, apoktenei.
Hays’s explanation: “Some scholars–including, apparently, the editors of Nestle-Aland–are suspicious of the better-attested reading, ‘if you kill with the sword,’ because it makes John’s prophetic word echo Matt. 26:52: ‘[A]ll who take the sword will perish by the sword.’ But that is the point: John has echoed Jeremiah’s oracle of prophetic judgment [Jer. 15:2, 43:11], filtering it through the tradition of Jesus’ saying in such a way that it becomes a divinely ordained vocation rather than a tragic necessity” (p. 185, n. 20).