Revelation Notes (Chapter 19)

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Ted Grimsrud

[See notes on Revelation 18]

Though both at the end of chapter sixteen and chapter eighteen, John writes of the completion of the destruction of Babylon, the story is not over, not even the destructive elements. However, it is crucial for the storyline that Babylon not longer exists as a lure to turn people from God. John turns toward another celebration scene at the beginning of chapter nineteen. Here, though there is a sense of something new—unlike earlier worship visions, this one is not so much celebrating the Lamb’s victory amidst the plagues. Now a crucial corner has been turned, Babylon is no more, and the New Jerusalem is much closer.

The final “battle” is just ahead, followed by the final judgment of humanity and the Dragon meeting his end. In all of this, John’s readers are challenged to remember the Lamb’s way as the way of God—and the path to victory for the entire world. The outcome is the healing and genuine justice of the New Jerusalem.

Revelation 19:1-10

The worship scene picks up on several images from earlier in the book. The “great multitude” points most directly back to chapter seven, though it also evokes the worship scenes from chapters five, twelve, fourteen, and fifteen. In chapter seven, in the midst of the seal series of plagues, John sees “a great multitude” beyond counting, “from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages” praising God and the Lamb to whom “salvation belongs” (7:9-10). Both “great multitudes” are dressed in white robes (7:9, 14; 19:8).

As with the earlier visions, here we have massive praise, “salvation and glory and power to our God” (19:1). The new dimension is that now we are told that God has “judged the great Harlot who corrupted the earth with her fornication.” God has brought justice due to the Harlot shedding “the blood of God’s servants” (19:2). As we know, and will be confirmed again in the second half of chapter nineteen, God’s method of gaining justice in relation to Babylon through persevering love even in the face of violent bloodletting by the structures of domination. And this justice will result in the destruction of the powers of evil and the healing of the kings of the earth and the nations. Continue reading →

Revelation Notes (Chapter 17)

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Ted Grimsrud—July 19, 2015

[See notes on Revelation 16]

We read at the end of chapter sixteen, “God remembered great Babylon and gave her the wine-cup of the fury of his wrath” (16:19). Now, in chapter seventeen and eighteen, the details of that “remembrance” will be presented. One of the bowl-plague angels comes to John to take him to see the “judgment of the great harlot” (17:1).

We should note that it is presumably the same angel who will later come again to John to take him to see “the bride, the wife of the Lamb,” that is, New Jerusalem (21:9). The same exact wording is used in both places, indicating that these two visions should be understood in relation to one another. These are the two destinations that John holds out for his readers—trust in the Dragon and end up in fallen Babylon or trust in God and end up in New Jerusalem.

Revelation 17:1-6

We have got here a central symbol that is referring to another symbol. The “great harlot” refers to “great Babylon.” Clearly John does not have in mind an actual prostitute. And by the time of this writing, the ancient city of Babylon no longer existed. Probably the main source for the metaphors is the Old Testament. Already in the Old Testament these two images were used to signify the social embodiments of idolatry, rebellion against God, violence, and injustice.

On the immediate level, John surely means to apply these symbols to Rome, the “city of seven hills” (17:9) that “rules over the kings of the earth” (17:18). Rome, who promises peace and insists that it operates with divine favor, stands as the most profound temptation for John’s readers. Those John most vociferously opposes apparently suggested that followers of Jesus many also function as comfortable actors in the Roman world—including taking part in the requisite public expressions of acquiescence to Roman civil religion. The worship moments scattered throughout Revelation are meant to counter that acquiescence.

We should read this account now as reflecting a broader critique. Just as Babylon, formerly a great empire but by John’s time a distant memory, worked metaphorically to provide insight into the character of the Roman Empire, so now Rome, also formerly a great empire but now a distant memory, works metaphorically to provide insight into the character of present-day empires (and all other empires throughout history)—most obviously for readers of this book, the American Empire. Continue reading →

Revelation Notes (Chapter 16)

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Ted Grimsrud

[See notes of Revelation 15]

Revelation sixteen describes all seven of the final set of plagues—the “bowl plagues” where seven angels pour out onto the earth “the wrath of God” (16:1). Unlike the partial destruction that the two early series of plagues (seals and trumpets) describe (in turn, one-quarter and one-third—perhaps the thunder plagues that were “sealed up” and not reported [10:4] would have told of one-half destruction), here the destruction is total (“every living thing in the sea died,” 16:3). With the seventh plague “a loud voice came out of the temple, from the throne, saying ‘It is done!’” (16:17). Now, John’s reporting of the “revelation of Jesus Christ” is not done. We still have six more chapters and several important visions to go. But this is the final plague and the expanding circle of destruction has reached its climax. The dynamics of wrath and destruction seem to have reached their culmination here. We will need to think carefully about these plague visions and also consider what is to come in Revelation—all in light of the core visions we have already heard, especially chapter five’s vision of the triumph of the Lamb—before we draw conclusions about what is being communicated in this chapter.

Revelation 16:1-11

The “loud voice from the temple” almost certainly is God’s voice telling the angels to “pour out on the earth” bowls of the “wrath of God” (16:1). We should read this description in light of what we have already discerned about God, the plagues, and wrath. The basic idea may be we are again going to have described for us the dynamics on earth during the “three and a half years” where the Dragon and his minions are wreaking havoc—but not in a way that will actually defeat God. “God’s wrath,” thus is not God direct anger being visited upon the earth in order to punish wrongdoing. Rather, it is what results when people turn against God and order their lives on the values of domination and exploitation—gaining their marching orders from the Beast and not from the Lamb. On a certain level, we may say that God allows the spiral of destruction loosed by the Dragon, but also that this spiral of destruction actually leads to the destruction of the Dragon himself along with the Beast and the False Prophet. Continue reading →

Revelation Notes (Chapter 14)

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Ted Grimsrud

[See notes on Revelation 13]

Chapter thirteen concludes with a call to wisdom. The picture of the Beast and the False Prophet exercising domination reflects the perspective many of John’s readers would have had. Some would have welcomed the Empire’s kind of “peace” and sought to accommodate with its ways to protect themselves from the kinds of consequences to resistance that are alluded to with the Beast “making war on the saints” (13:7). Others would have still believed in resisting the Beast but would have despaired of fighting “against it” (13:4).

So the call to wisdom is crucial (much more so than the exact meaning of the 666). The Beast might simply destroy the witness of the Lamb’s assembly—either by crushing the resisters or, more likely, by converting them to an accommodating approach to faith where the Beast and the Lamb seemingly coexist.

John wastes no time, though, in countering the temptation to accommodate or despair. Of course, the content in Revelation leading up to the vision in chapter thirteen also gave powerful reasons not to take that vision as definitive of the actual situation. Jesus already has been identified as the ruler of the kings of the earth, worthy to be worshiped by all creation and the one who brings healing to countless multitudes from all corners of the earth. Chapter fourteen, then, actually does not provide the antidote to the Beast’s claims so much as reiterate what has already been asserted—but with new depth.

Revelation 14:1-5

The impact of the contrast between the “I saw…” of 13:1 and the “then I saw…” of 13:11 with the “then I looked…” of 14:1 is lessened a bit by the chapter division. However, the three need to be read together. The vision of 14:1-5 is the conclusion to the Beast account. What is seen in chapter thirteen only has meaning in Revelation in light of the conclusion in 14:1-5. Continue reading →

Revelation Notes (chapter 13)

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Ted Grimsrud

[See notes on Revelation 12]

Chapter 12 ended with an ominous image, “the Dragon was angry with the woman, and went off to make war on the rest of her children, those who keep the commandments of God and hold the testimony of Jesus” (12:17). What follows will be an account of this “war,” though we should understand that what this verse refers to is the same phenomenon we have already seen in the plague visions.

And, crucially, we also already know the outcome of this war. Revelation does not allow for any doubts about the outcome of the Dragon’s war. Right away, back at 1:5, we read the affirmation that Jesus is the victorious “ruler of the kings of the earth.” Then, the center point of the book, chapter five, proclaims Jesus as worthy “to receive power and wealth and honor and glory and blessing” (5:12).

So, whatever the impression we might get from the picture of the Dragon’s “war,” especially in the vision of the mighty Beast we see in chapter thirteen, this is a war that is not really a war. The outcome is not in doubt—and, as we will see, the methods of combat between the Dragon’s side and those “who told the testimony of Jesus” are quite different, two diametrically opposed approaches to “conquering.”

Revelation 13:1-10—The Beast from the sea and the politics of domination

We briefly met the Beast back in chapter eleven where the “two witnesses” (essentially the same as those who hold the testimony of Jesus in 12:17) are warred upon, conquered and killed by the Beast “that comes up from the bottomless pit” (11:7). This “bottomless pit” is first mentioned at 9:1, where a “fallen star” goes from heaven to earth, is given a key to the shaft of the bottomless pit, and sets a plague of locusts who torture “those who do not have the seal of God on their foreheads … for five months” (9:4-5). Continue reading →

An interview on justice, mercy, and God’s love

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Ted Grimsrud—June 17, 2015

In February, 2015, I was privileged to be a guest on a radio show, Community Justice Talks, on KHEN-FM, Salida, Colorado. The show’s host, Molly Rowan Leach, interviewed me for about half an hour. We talked about an article I had written, “Violence as a Theological Problem” and my two books, Instead of Atonement: The Bible’s Salvation Story and Our Hope for Justice, and The Good War That Wasn’t—And Why It Matters: World War II’s Moral Legacy.

The recording of that interview is now available. Here’s a link to a page that allows visitors to listen to the interview directly or to download a podcast. Or it can be listened to here as well. What follows is an edited written transcript of the interview.

Molly Rowan Leach—This is Community Justice Talks. And I’m your host, Molly Rowan Leach. And you’re listening to KHEN-LP Salida, Colorado, 106.9 FM. You can stream us at khen.org. It’s great to be here today and I am really looking forward to the conversation that we’re about to have with Professor Ted Grimsrud from Eastern Mennonite University. He’s on the line live with us, coming from his university back east in Harrisonburg, Virginia.

Here on Community Justice Talks we like to talk with people from local and statewide as well as nationwide movements towards solutions in conflict and crime. This show aims to provide hope, solutions, and to have an open, honest dialogue about justice that is unfiltered—at the very personal as well as communal and national levels.

We are focusing today on unpacking violence as a theological problem. Ted had a blog post that was published just last week on Open Democracy, which is an excellent blog and news site. You can get more information and read blogs and news there at opendemocracy.net. His post, on the 16th of February, was called “Violence as a Theological Problem.” It has a lot of inspiring details that unpack why we in the United States seem to justify violence. He writes: “Deeply ingrained in the religious consciousness of the United States is the belief that retribution is God’s will. According to the logic of retribution, holiness governs God’s behavior. As a holy God, God cannot stand to be in the presence of impurity, of human sin. Human beings invariably violate that holiness because all of us are sinners. God is bound to respond to sin with punishment because to forgive would violate God’s holiness. Compassion without satisfaction is not possible for God in this tradition.”

Further on in the article, Ted talks about restorative justice. And of course at Eastern Mennonite University, there’s a powerful program called the Zehr Institute for Restorative Justice that was spearheaded by Dr. Howard Zehr, who is considered and honored as one of the wayshowers and leaders of the movement here in the United States, at least of the modern movement.

Ted is Professor of Theology and Peace Studies. Prior to teaching at EMU, beginning in 1996, he served ten years as a pastor in Mennonite churches in Oregon, Arizona, and South Dakota. He is especially interested in the connection between Christian theology and pacifism. He teaches classes in theology, peace studies, ethics, and the Bible. His books include, most recently, published just this last November, The Good War That Wasn’t—And Why It Matters: The Moral Legacy of World War II. He also blogs at ThinkingPacifism.net and has a website that gathers his writings at PeaceTheology.net. Continue reading →

Sin: What it is and what to do about it—Paul’s message in Romans 6

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Ted Grimsrud

A sermon preached at Shalom Mennonite Congregation—Harrisonburg, VA, June 14, 2015, Romans 6:1-23

Sometimes little things are powerful—the most dangerous spiders are those little brown recluses. The hottest chili peppers are the tiny Carolina creepers. And the word “sin”—with only three letters—has all kinds of significance for religious people, and those who know religious people.

Problems with “sin”

One of the problems in North American Christianity is that the word sin is used mainly by people on one side of the theological spectrum. It feels like a harsh and finger pointing kind of word. So good peaceable progressives tend to avoid it. The result is a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy where everybody cedes the meaning of sin to those who do use it in hurtful ways.

We all do know that to call something a sin is to say it’s very bad. It’s like the famous story about President Calvin Coolidge back in the 1920s. He was notoriously a man of few words. One Sunday he went to church and later met with some reporters. “What was the sermon about,” he was asked. “It was about sin.” “What did the preacher say about sin?” “He said he was agin it.” … What more is there to say?

Well, a few decades later, the Louvin Brothers, one of the great country music brother singing acts , recorded a song called “Broadminded” that did say a little more: “That word broadminded is spelled s-i-n. I read in my Bible, they shall not enter in. Depart, I never knew you. That word broadminded is spelled s-i-n.” The song goes on to list the really bad sins—to “gamble now and then for pleasure,” to “drink a little whisky to please a friend,” and to go “dancing with friends.”

Of course we can think of even more hurtful ways the label sin is used. If it’s people others want to exclude or silence or marginalize, they can be accused of being sinful, of “living in sin.” One of the reasons this hurtful use of sin language is too bad is that many of us tend to react against using it at all then—and that makes for a challenge when we want to find language to use to talk about things that are genuinely wrong—like war and environmental exploitation and racism. We don’t find it meaningful to say those things are sinful—but we don’t have other words that work, either.

But there is another problem with the way “sin” is used among Christians. If it’s used as a word for the evils of “broadmindedness” or if it’s a word we refuse to use—in both cases we think of “sin” mainly as rule violations or moralistically objectionable behavior. To think of sin in these ways makes it harder to understand one of the Apostle Paul’s use of sin language—and we miss Paul’s helpful contributions to how we might approach life in healing and creative ways. Continue reading →

Revelation Notes (chapter 12)

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Ted Grimsrud

[See notes on Revelation 11]

With chapter twelve, John begins a more detailed account that provides a fuller picture of the forces at work in the plagues we have seen and will see more of. It becomes more clear over the next several chapters how the Powers of evil are involved in the kinds of events that make up the plagues—and how the victory of God is won and implemented.

First, “God’s temple in heaven” is opened (11:19) as part of the seventh trumpet vision that announces “the kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Messiah” (that is, the One on the throne and the Lamb) and the time has come “for destroying those who destroy the earth” (11:18). This “time has come” should best be seen as a plot device—the time of the story where we turn to the “destroyers of the earth” and their fate has come. Revelation is not setting out a chronology for the world’s future so much as exhorting its readers to part of the work that will destroy the earth’s destroyers—who are the Powers behind the empires of the world, including the Roman Empire.

The “opening” of the temple here signals the coming change in focus in the second half of the book that will culminate with a return to the temple—though we will see in chapters twenty-one and twenty-two that John has in mind a radically changed notion of the temple.

Revelation 12:1-6—The two main actors

Chapter twelve contains a wealth of images and events—many are cryptic and difficult to understand. As elsewhere in Revelation, with this chapter we should focus more on the overall sensibility that is being conveyed more than expect to see in each of the images a direct correlation with a particular historical person or event. With all the uncertainty we can’t help but have about many of specifics, the general message here is pretty clear—a new dimension is added to the story with the introduction of the Dragon. We are now able better to understand the paradoxes of previous chapters concerning the plagues in relation to the One on the throne who is so closely linked with the Lamb. God is not the only cosmic actor in this drama. Continue reading →

Christian pacifism and the “Good War”

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Ted Grimsrud—May 30, 2015

Does Christian pacifism make the claim that everyone should be pacifist? Or is pacifism only a calling for those who affirm Jesus as Lord? This issue can—and should—be addressed on a theological and philosophical level. However, it may also be addressed on a more pragmatic level. Are there wars that should have been fought, that could be considered legitimately justifiable wars? If there are no ways that any actual war could be justifiable, is that a basis for claiming that everyone should be pacifist (defining “pacifism” here as the conviction that one should never take part in or support warfare)?

The one certain “just war”?

One way to begin to address the question about how widely we should advocate for pacifism is to look closely at the one war that most Americans, at least, including even many American pacifists, believe was a “just war”—World War II. Robert Brimlow, a Roman Catholic philosopher and committed pacifist, draws such a conclusion: “The war against Hitler, Nazism, and the atrocities they perpetuated certainly satisfies all the requirements for a just war: even if no other war was justifiable, even if every other dispute could have been settled by nonviolent means, that dispute could only have been solved through violence.”[1]

This statement is part of Brimlow’s argument in favor of pacifism—but it’s a pacifism based on a sense of the special calling of followers of Jesus. The kind of nonviolence Brimlow advocates is based on faithfulness, not on the expectation that it might practically be the best way to deal with conflict.

In the same book with Brimlow’s essay, Methodist theologian Stephen Long makes a similar argument. Long also suggests that World War II may be seen as a just war, where it was shown that “violence and war do sometimes work.”[2] Long argues for what he calls “christological pacifism,” an approach that “only makes sense because of the christological convictions we hold about what God has done in Christ. If Jesus is not the unique and definitive expression of God’s economy, of how God redeems the world and engages it politically through the cross, resurrection, and ascension—if he were not bodily raised from the dead—then pacifism makes no sense.”[3]

However, there is no evidence that I know of of any correlation between Long’s kind of christological convictions and the likelihood of one holding those convictions being a pacifist. World War II was perhaps as true a test of pacifist convictions as could be imagined. Because of the widespread popularity of that war, only those with clear pacifist convictions would have chosen to be legal conscientious objectors. If Long is correct about the link between a high christology and pacifism, you would expect people who affirmed that christology to tend toward pacifism even in face of a popular war. As it turned out, about 12,000 young American men took the CO route, and something more than 12,000,000 entered the military. That is, the number of Americans who responded to the War as pacifists was something like 0.01%. The traditions that tended to emphasize doctrine more (e.g., Roman Catholics, Lutherans, and evangelical Protestants) had few if any conscientious objectors.[4]

To respond to a phenomenon such as World War II as a Christian pacifist, it seems to me, requires a broader sense of how this pacifism works than that provided by Brimlow and Long. To affirm pacifism without condemning World War II as an unjust war weakens the case for pacifism significantly. Continue reading →

It all starts with love: Paul’s message in Romans 5

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Ted Grimsrud

A sermon preached at Shalom Mennonite, May 17, 2015, Romans 5:1-21 

You know, growing older is a crazy thing. On my birthday a bit more than a week ago my sister posted on Facebook a picture of me when I was about one year old. I looked at that picture (which I don’t remember having seen before) with wonder. That happy, chubby little kid was me—sixty years ago! Then I realized that I am as far from that picture now as I would have been then from a picture taken in 1895.

Or, as I put this sermon together I was thinking of a popular song I remember by folksinger Joan Baez called “Love is Just a Four Letter Word.” Written by Bob Dylan, it was a song I liked when it was new. Well, it came out in 1969. Back then, a song as old as that one is now would have been released in 1923—before country music was invented, and about thirty years before rock and roll.

As is typical with Dylan songs, the lyrics are a bit cryptic, unclear, oblique, and obscure. But the title, repeated many times as a chorus, has stuck with me. Is love “just a four letter word”? We Christians would say, no way. Love is one of our most important positive words—love is the opposite of an obscenity. God is all about love. If we believe in God, we believe in love, right?

God is all about love

But what do we actually mean when we say “God is all about love”? We might even say, quoting one of the letters of John, “God is love”—I certainly believe that. I think the Apostle Paul did, too. And I think this statement, “God is love” is an important clue for understanding Paul’s letter to the Romans.

It’s interesting, though, that sometimes it seems difficult to articulate what we actually mean by love—both when we attribute it to God and when we think about what exactly it is in human experience. I think more than ever, it is important to think carefully about love. Like the British poet W. H. Auden famously wrote at the outset of World War II, “we must love one another or die.”

The fifth chapter of Romans is an important love chapter—maybe not quite as potent at 1 Corinthians 13 (“These three remain, faith, hope, and love—but the greatest of these is love”) yet potent enough, if we can get a sense of what Paul is saying. Continue reading →