Introduction:
J. R. R. Tolkien, author of Lord of the Rings, was a scholar of the
faerie story genre. In describing this
genre, he coined a new word for the plot of faerie stories: 'eucatastrophe'. We know what a catastrophe is, but the 'eu' in front of a word means
'good'. A 'good catastrophe'. Tolkien also described the Christian Gospel
in the same terms--a eucatastrophe which also happens to be true. Rev. 11, our text this morning, is a vision
that describes the Church's mission in the world as a eucatastrophe.
My father’s premillennial,
apocalyptic theology allowed no room for positivist views that believed society
was getting better: evolution, socio-economic development, scientific
progress. His theology of ultimate doom
served him better than those missionaries (fewer than often maintained,
incidentally) who confused the Gospel with colonialism, whose postmillenialism
led to a social Gospel activism ala
Walter Rauschenbusch. They believed
things were improving at the hands of activist do-gooders bringing on God's
Kingdom. Yet, in Apartheid South Africa , my father's theology served him well: things were
wicked and getting worse. His focus was
the Church: 'I will build my Church, and the gates of hell will not prevail'
was a favourite text. His understanding
of the use of power for good ends was encapsulated in a key text for us today,
found in Zech. 4.6: 'Not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit says the
Lord.' The possibilities of a
transformational theology for society were for him dark shadows of speculation
beside the clear light of a theology of transformed hearts as people repented
of their sins and began to follow Christ in life. Again and again he saw the remarkable change
as murderers, thieves, witch doctors, idolaters, racists (black and white),
wife beaters, and the like repented of their sins and began to follow
Christ. And, in following Christ,
society was changed. During the
Sharpville massacre and unrest in South Africa in 1960, the chief of police
asked my father to go into the black townships and preach because he had
witnessed the social transformation that came as people turned to Christ. My father had taken two truck-loads of stolen
goods plus six uncut diamonds to the police as a result of people turning to
Jesus.
Thus, my father's
Christo-centric, evangelistic theology did not remove him from social issues:
it put him at the centre of them. He
found himself pleading for racial justice in the South African courts,
witnessing to Christ's transforming power before the chief of police, preaching
the love of God to racist Afrikaners, welcoming blacks into our home as friends
to the fury of racist neighbours, arguing before government the need for
inter-racial Bible colleges and being granted permission by Parliamentary vote
to have the first (to my knowledge) non-quota, residential, inter-racial
college in South Africa. He also helped
establish over 35 churches and one Bible college in South Africa, but he did
not see these as his own achievements.
He lived by the verse 'Not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit,
says the Lord.'
My father's theology was not
only shaped by how he saw human effort in a sinful world. Early in his ministry he saw the power of God
to bring lasting transformation for those held captive by the power of Satan. There are those in the West who do not believe
much in evil, let alone Satan, unless it can be phrased in socio-political
terms. However, my father knew what the
Association of African Evangelicals now states in its statement of faith, that
the devil is real. Early in his
evangelistic ministry, he encountered the spiritual power of witch doctors--no
mere traditional healers--who challenged the power of God with the power of
darkness. On one occasion, one such person came to
him for prayer, and immediately upon touching the man my father was
electrically shocked. He said it was
like taking hold of a live electrical current.
He could not pull his hands off of the man and was in great pain. At the same time, my mother, who was sick and
at home, felt a darkness come over her that was so dark that she could not speak
anything but the name of Jesus. She knew
my father was in danger and prayed in this way until the darkness left. If you had ever talked with my father, you
would not easily have found out any of this: he was a shy and quiet man,
nothing like the stereo-typical Pentecostal on television screens, and he
avoided sensationalising his ministry or giving any credit to the power of
evil.
You would also not easily have
found out about the demons possessing people whom he met from time to
time. My father made it his policy not to mention these experiences. Remarkable stories, those, for us
Westernised theologians. Take, for
example, the woman in a rural village in the northern Traansvaal who could not
speak a word of English but spoke, or the demon spoke, to my father in English
with an American accent. Or the woman
diagnosed as schizophrenic in California whose
demons knew of my father's casting out demons in South Africa without any report of this Orange Free State
Revelation 11
In Revelation 11, amidst all
the doom and gloom of apocalyptic judgement, we read of a measuring of the
Temple, two witnesses, and the coming of the Reign of God. The interpretation of the details are debated
among scholars, as so often in apocalyptic literature. We are, though, helped here by an awareness of
clear references to the Old Testament.
First, Zechariah 4 also mentions two olive trees and a lampstand. There, too, we find a Temple under
construction. Revelation 11 is using the
vision of the restoration of the Israelite temple by Zerubbabel to make its
point.
The measuring of theTemple Temple Temple Temple Temple
The measuring of the
The other Old Testament clue
to this chapter comes at the end of Rev. 10 (vv. 9-11), when John is told to
eat the scroll. This image comes from
Ezekiel 3, where Ezekiel also eats a scroll sweet as honey in his mouth but
which entails prophesying bitter words to the sinful exiles from Israel. The prophecy is a warning to turn from
sin. So, too, in Rev. 11, the two
witnesses deliver a message in Jerusalem as
though it were Sodom or Egypt Sodom and Egypt Israel
in exile for her sins being called out of exile into the Kingdom of God
However, Rev. 11.7-8 says that
the two witnesses will be killed by the beast that comes up out of the
bottomless pit. Those given power to
testify a message of warning in the wicked city will be overcome by evil. Yet, as we read on, this catastrophe turns out
to have a good outcome: after 3 1/2 days of lying dead in the streets, being
gloated over by the wicked, who even exchange presents and rejoice over the end
of the voice of prophecy in a wicked world, the two witnesses are raised from
the dead. These two witnesses do not
appear to me to be the Church itself, as some would interpret it, but they do
represent the Church's witness in a
wicked world. Their experience is the
experience of the Church of the 90's, when John's Apocalypse appears to have
been written in the reign of the megalomaniac emperor, Domitian, who persecuted
the Church. They have born witness. Some, like John, have been imprisoned. And some, like the voices crying out from
under the altar, 'How long?' (6.10), have already been martyred. The answer to this cry is given throughout
the book of Revelation, and it is that this is the time of witness. The Church is not merely to witness the good
news, the Gospel, but also to bear witness of God’s coming judgement. The missio
Dei in this world is the witness of God’s glory, which is both about His
great salvation and grace and His impending judgement upon all wickedness. Rev. 11 ends with a vision of the coming of
God's reign and the opening of the Temple
In Ezekiel 3, Ezekiel is
told to prophesy the words of the scroll that are sweet in his mouth. Yet he is told that if he does not prophesy
words of judgement, words of warning, the people will in any event be killed
but their blood will be on Ezekiel's hands.
The people in view are the covenant people of God in exile for their sins--the
message is at least first and foremost a message, like the seven letters at the
beginning of Revelation, to the people of God. However, the role of witnessing in Revelation is also to the world. It is a warning about disobeying God's Law,
which, as the 10 Commandments in the Ark of the Covenant state, is first about
worshipping Him and second about how we have treated one another. The lampstand or lampstands are to shed light
on both types of commandments.
The two witnesses are
charged to bring the same witness as the Church and so they illustrate the
witness of the Church in the world. It
is a witness to God's people (cf. Ezek. 3) as well as to those outside the
Church (Rev. 11.10). It is a warning to
worship God alone and to practice justice and righteousness in this world. It is not a charge to the Church to do so
expecting great results, as though missions is a triumphant march of
Christendom throughout the world. Catastrophe
is predicted, and the readers of Revelation have already experienced this. Here is no postmillennial positivism, let
alone prosperity Gospel: being a Christian may well mean martyrdom. However, if the Church loses its witness in the
world, the blood of those whom God will judge will be on its hands--on our
hands. Yet this is precisely the
challenge the Church faces today, as some are calling for a less-Christocentric
and more generic, non-Biblical, theology,[3]
and others are altering God's Laws and the teaching of Jesus to their own views
of what is right.
Jürgen Moltmann and Revelation
Jürgen Moltmann, unlike my
father’s theology and experience in ministry, has called for us to revise our
reading of Revelation (Revisioning Our
Reading of Revelation). He says that
we must 'Christianise the apocalyptic notion of Judgement, so that instead of
awakening fears of hell it rouses hope for righteousness and justice.’[4] He proposes this 'gospel of life' reading of
Revelation over against three supposedly (this is all very fanciful!) earlier
readings in Church history:
1.
Imperium Sacrum: Christian rule
in God's name--'nothing less than the Thousand Years' Empire of Christ'[5]--meant
'missionizing' the heathen under Christian emperors, Tsars, Spanish Kings, and
then 19th century Christian civilisation. Moltmann suggests that it was mission in the
name of God the Father and Lord.
2.
Church: 'We know
Christian mission as the spread of the Christian church urbi et orbi, from Rome , from Wittenberg , Geneva or Canterbury to the world
3.
Evangelisation: personal
decisions of faith, 'personal acceptance
in faith of Christ's holy rule.’[7] Modern evangelism, says Moltmann, was in the
name of Christ, was Christ-centred.
All three views depend on
the apocalyptic expectation that Christ's rule has already begun and must
spread in the world before the tribulation to come. Over against such a 'reading' of Revelation, Moltmann proposes the following:
- ‘How would
it be if today we were to make the salvation, healing, liberation and
affirmation of life the content of Christian mission, and link the mission
of life with the gospel of the Spirit who is the life-giver?’[8]
- 'What is now
waiting for us at the end of the second millenium and the beginning of the
third is mission in the name of the
Holy Spirit. 'Missio Dei' must be understood as
God's sending His Spirit.’[9]
- 'The mission
of Jesus and the mission of the Spirit are nothing other than movements of
life: movements of healing, of liberation, of righteousness and justice.’[10]
- 'So
Christian mission isn't concerned about Christianity; its concern is the
life of men and women. And the
church's mission isn't concerned about the church; its concern is the
kingdom of God. And evangelization
isn't concerned about spreading the doctrine of faith; its concern is the
life of the world.’[11]
- Moltmann
defines 'life' as a filling of our human life with God's life.[12]
- A hermeneutic is then proposed: 'What is to be worked out in the texts is what promotes life, and whatever is hostile to life will be subjected to criticism.[13]
This 'hermeneutic' allows
Moltmann to alter the missionary question about 'anonymous Christians' in other
religions to consider what in other religions promotes life:
Everything which
ministers to life in other religions and cultures is good, and must be absorbed
into the coming 'culture of life'.
Everything which among us and other people hinders, destroys or
sacrifices life is bad, and must be overcome, as 'the barbarism of death'.[14]
Moltmann is clear about his
version of universal theology over against pre-modern and modern theology:
According to the
earlier classification of the religions under the doctrine of original sin,
these people must cut themselves off radically from the 'superstition' of their
fathers and the 'idolatry' of their people, if they become Christians. According to the modern, pluralistic theology
of religion, they don't need to become Christians at all, if they have found
the divine truth in their own religion.
In my own view, everything a person is, and everything which has put its
impress on him culturally and religiously can become his charisma, if he is
called, touched and stirred, and if he loves life and works together with other
people for the kingdom of God.[15]
Moltmann's theology is a
classic example of contextual theology gone wrong. Like the Prosperity Gospel (and there are
close links between this and Liberation Theology), it wants only to speak of
nice things. There is no bitterness to
the Church's witness, only honey. For
Moltmann, there is only hope, not judgement; there is only the love of life,
not a need for Christ's ‘good catastrophe’ of the cross at all. The Lordship of
Christ[16]
is itself surpassed, now, with the life force of the Spirit. Moltmann's mission theology has no need of
God the Father--a postcolonial theology will take care of that archaic
patriarchalism for him. It has no need
of the Church, and no need of Christ.
Moltmann's 'gospel' is certainly only a 'pleasing' gospel, not an
apocalyptic Gospel. He constructs it
with some confused understanding of the Spirit.
On the contrary, in Rev. 11, the Spirit is the holy oil of the Church's
light, its testimony of Christ, in the world, a warning testimony to turn to
God and live according to His Law.
The Importance of Apocalypticism in
Christian, Mission Theology
However, what if we discard the
prophetic warnings of the Old Testament?
What if we discard the apocalyptic theology of the New Testament
writings? Apart from abandoning theology
as Biblical interpretation, we also have then a theology that, like the social
Gospel theology of the early 20th century, looks at the world
through rose coloured glasses. Culture
is the Church’s dance partner. Reinhold Niebuhr's (Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics) criticism of this theology after two world wars was appropriate. Yet, unlike Niebuhr, Revelation does not
offer half-measures of the Gospel in the name of 'justice', such as 'Just War
Theory'. Revelation calls for the Church
to find its voice in the midst of catastrophe and martyrdom, to proclaim the
Gospel knowing that God can take our catastrophe in this life and use it to
proclaim His glory as well as bring all things to a just end, even if this
means resurrecting the dead for judgement.
Rev. 11 ends with a
remarkably subversive telling of the Elijah narrative. Faced with the wickedness of Israel Israel
The
movement in Revelation is from catastrophe to praise. Ch. 11 ends this way:
16 Then the twenty-four elders who sit on their thrones before God fell
on their faces and worshiped God, 17 singing, "We give you thanks, Lord
God Almighty, who are and who were, for you have taken your great power and
begun to reign. 18 The nations raged, but your wrath has come, and the time for
judging the dead, for rewarding your servants, the prophets and saints and all
who fear your name, both small and great, and for destroying those who destroy
the earth."
This
praise involves catastrophe for the workers of catastrophe.[17] Such a narrative is entirely consistent with
God's self-revelation to Moses in Ex. 34, where both compassion and judgement
go together:
6 The LORD passed before him, and proclaimed, "The LORD, the LORD, a
God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and
faithfulness, 7 keeping steadfast love for the thousandth generation, forgiving
iniquity and transgression and sin, yet by no means clearing the guilty, but
visiting the iniquity of the parents upon the children and the children's
children, to the third and the fourth generation."
This
theology of God's future judgement in Revelation does not lead to a passive
quietism in the present, as Karl Marx feared--religion as an ‘opiate’ of the
people. It leads to active witness, even
when faced with death. 'Testimony' and
'witness' are words one finds a number of times in Revelation, as in ch.
11. Jesus is the faithful witness (1.2)
and the content of the Church's testimony (1.9, taking the Genitive as
objective, but possibly also subjective).
Christians have the task of testifying or witnessing, usually unto death
(2.13; 17.6; 1.9; 6.9; 11.3, 7; 12.11, 17; 19.10; 20.4). What makes this testimony so dangerous? The testimony to Jesus is a testimony to his
Lordship over all, and this means a challenge to Rome
Nor is
the Biblical hope that we will sit around with fellow life-promoters from all
religions and sing Kumbaya after a day of activism, as Moltmann offers.
Our hope is that people will fall to their faces and worship the one
true God, who will bring justice to this world.
This hope of justice frees us in our witness to follow the way of the
cross in our witness to the world. We do
not use the power of this age to achieve a form of divine justice. And we reject the way of holy war, because we
have a story that says that good is found on the other side of catastrophe,
even our own, so we may leave vengeance to God (Deuteronomy 32.35; Romans
12.19). Jesus rejected holy war.[18] He did not say 'pick up your swords and
follow me to Jerusalem' but 'pick up your crosses and follow me.' Nor did he achieve a confused notion of
retributive justice by giving his life to kill his enemies, as with today's
suicide bombers and terrorists interpreting a different theology in a religion without
the cross of Jesus Christ. Instead,
Christ gave his life to give life, even to his enemies, forgiving us of our
sins. We are a people, like the first
readers of Revelation, who have a narrative that can interpret catastrophe, not
deny it. Rev. 11.8 ties the 3 1/2 days
of death of the two witnesses to the 3 days of Jesus' death. Afterwards comes the resurrection and
exaltation. Our hope is not in causing
catastrophe, as in Northern Ireland, Iraq, North Ossetia, Nigeria, and other
places witnessing terrorism. Nor is it
in denying coming judgement. Instead, it is
in seeing catastrophe as culminating by God’s grace in something good, that
through our cruciform witness we will save many and that God will bring
judgement, not us, to the destroyers of the earth. Only such a theology frees the Church to find
its voice in a wicked world to warn against idolatry and evil practices, to
deliver its Spirit-filled witness before the altar in a wicked land.
Conclusion
In conclusion, Rev. 11
depicts the mission of the Church in the world as, in Tolkien's terms, a 'eucatastrophe'—a
catastrophe that, like fairy tales (but one that is true), turns out to have a
good ending after a frightful development in the plot. The two witnesses of Revelation 11 may be eschatological
figures in their own right, but they represent the Church in its missionary
witness here and now. We learn several
things about the Church's mission from this chapter:
1.
The authority of the Church to fulfil its mission
comes from God, who is sovereign and Almighty (11.17). The Church's mission is to witness. Indeed, upon completion of the Church's
witness, this witness is destroyed by the one who rises from the bottomless
pit.
2. The Church's witness is Christ-centred. Every heresy begins by diminishing the
centrality of Christ.
3. However, as Revelation makes so plain, a witness to
Christ is also an indictment of the Empire, with its pretentious and even
blasphemous claims to power, its abuse of power, and its amassing of wealth
(cf. ch. 18). The Kingdom of this age is
not the Kingdom of our God. The Church's
witness of Christ, if it is a true witness (and it is), will not be welcomed by the State. The very notion of a State Church or of a
Christendom is anathema, an inevitable compromise of the Gospel and grotesque
distortion of Christian faith. The idea
that political power--or any human power--can be used to bring about God's
Kingdom is unthinkable. The Church's
witness is always compromised when believers try to harness the Beast's power
to plough furrows of righteousness in the sinful earth. The message of the two olive trees is 'Not by
might, nor by power, but by my Spirit, says the Lord.'
4. Revelation stands as a testimony that social
transformation may ultimately be a doomed enterprise. The relevance of Christ for present society
cannot be underestimated, but too often in history has a witness to Christ been
replaced by a social Gospel, which is all about human effort at what is deemed
good and easily becomes nothing to do with Jesus Christ. I have used the well-known scholar Jürgen
Moltmann to illustrate this error.
5. The witness of Christ, finally, is not only a
witness to Christ but also the witness that Christ gave. This witness draws people away from idolatry
to the one, true God. And it calls for
righteousness--rightness--in the way we live here and now. This witness is pictured in ch. 11 by the end
of the Church's witness culminating in the revelation of the ark of the
covenant, with its ten commandments that call people to worship God and to live
righteously. This is the whole Gospel
witnessed in the whole world.
[2] They dress in sackcloth, the symbol of repentance (cf. Jonah
3.4-10; Mt. 11.21; Lk. 10.13) and call people to repentance, just as Ezekiel's
message (Ez. 3).
[3] This may be true of David Tracy's theological project on the
Spirit. In an interview with Scott
Holland of CrossCurrents Spring 2002,
Vol. 52.1 (Spring, 2002) (http://www.crosscurrents.org/Tracyspring2002.htm), Tracy
[4] Jurgen Moltmann, 'The Mission of the Spirit--The Gospel of Life,' in Mission--An Invitation to God's Future,
ed. T. Yates (Calver, Hope Valley, Near Sheffield: Cliff College Academic
Press, 2000), pp. 19-34, here p. 27.
[16] Richard Bauckham, The
Theology of the Book of Revelation. New
Testament Theology (Cambridge:
Cambridge Univ. Press, 1993) (about p. 60): A peculiar grammatical use in Rev.
might be explained by John's concern to include worship of Jesus in a
monotheistic theology. Mention of God
and Christ together is followed by a singular verb (11.15) or singular pronouns
(6.17; 22.3-4). Whether Jn. refers to
both together in the singular or reverts to speaking only of God, He carefully
avoids speaking of the two as a plurality.
[17] Richard Bauckham, The
Theology of the Book of Revelation, p. 53: Regarding God destroying the
destroyers of the earth (11.18), Bauckham says that this word play is also
found in the Flood narrative of Genesis and with the word "sahat":
Gen. 6.11-13, 17, God destroys those corrupting the earth. The beast comes out of the sea--symbol for
chaos (13.1), but in 21.1 the "sea is no more"--all corrupting
influence is removed from the new creation.
The final judgment is not so much a destroying of the earth but a
removal of the corruption from the earth.
(53).
[18] Richard Bauckham, Theology of
Revelation: In the vision of Rev. 4-5, Jesus is both militaristic
Messiah--the Lion of Judah--and slaughtered Lamb. He conquers, to be sure, but He conquers
through the cross and resurrection (74).
The militaristic and nationalistic hopes of Jewish messianism are
reinterpreted by John in light of the cross.
All nations (5.9) worship Him.
Similarly, Christians conquer Satan "by the blood of the Lamb and
by the word of their testimony, for they did not cling to life even in the face
of death" (12.11), i.e., by their own deaths as Christian martyrs
following Christ's example and so bearing witness--witness to Christ's witness.