All posts tagged Revelation

  • April 29, 2017

    The Cults of Caesar and Christ

    DivineAugustus

    The Cults of Caesar and Christ
    Brian Zahnd

    The original name for what would eventually became known as Christianity was “the Way.” You won’t find “Christianity” in the Bible, but you will find “the Way” seven times in the book of Acts. If you had asked a baptized follower of Jesus during the first century, “What is your religion?,” she most likely would have replied, “I belong to the Way.” This is what the Apostle Paul said in his hearing before the Roman governor Felix: “I admit that I follow the Way, which they call a cult.” (Acts 24:14)

    The common life of following Jesus together was called the Way, not because it was the way to heaven (the afterlife was never the emphasis), but because they had come to believe that in his death and resurrection Jesus had inaugurated a new way of life. Because the lifestyle of the Way was such a radical departure from the way of the Roman Empire, it is no surprise that people viewed the Way with great suspicion and often maligned it as a dangerous cult.
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    No Comments / Culture, Empire, Jesus, Revelation /

  • May 17, 2016

    City of the Lamb

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    City of the Lamb
    Brian Zahnd

    In the last two chapters of the book of Revelation John of Patmos weaves a tapestry of images borrowed from Genesis, Exodus, Psalms, Isaiah, Daniel, Ezekiel, and Zechariah. The culmination of John’s artistry is a stunning vision of hope — the city of the Lamb. In painting this portrait John borrows in particular from Ezekiel’s vision of a new temple.

    Ezekiel was a priest and prophet during the Babylonian exile in the 5th century BC. At a time when the Jerusalem temple was in ruins Ezekiel had a vision of a new temple (or we could say a new Jerusalem). What Ezekiel saw wasn’t the Second Temple that would be built by Zerubbabel and later expanded by King Herod, but a mystical temple. Ezekiel’s temple was a symbolic temple reflecting a spiritual agenda.
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    No Comments / Eschatology, Revelation /

  • May 8, 2016

    War of the Lamb

    LambOfGod

    War of the Lamb
    Brian Zahnd

    Those who want to hold onto a primitive vision of a violent and retributive God often cite the white horse rider passage from Revelation. They will say something like this: “Jesus came the first time as a lamb, but he’s coming back the second time as a lion.” (Despite the fact that no lion is ever seen in Revelation — the lion is the Lamb!) By this they mean the nonviolent Jesus of the Gospels is going to mutate into what they fantasize is the hyper-violent Jesus of Revelation.

    Sadly, the proponents of this flawed interpretation seem to prefer their imagined violent Jesus of the future over the nonviolent Jesus of the Gospels. At a basic level they essentially see the Bible like this: After a long trajectory away from the divine violence of the Old Testament culminating in Jesus renouncing violence and calling his followers to love their enemies, the Bible in its final pages abandons a vision of peace and nonviolence as ultimately unworkable and closes with the most vicious portrayal of divine violence in all of Scripture.

    In this reading of Revelation, the way of peace and love which Jesus preached during his life and endorsed in his death, is rejected for the worn-out way of war and violence. When we literalize the militant images of Revelation we arrive at this conclusion: In the end even Jesus gives up on love and resorts to violence. Tragically, those who refuse to embrace the way of peace taught by Jesus use the symbolic war of Revelation 19 to silence the Sermon on the Mount.
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    No Comments / Eschatology, Jesus, Revelation, Violence, War /

  • May 2, 2016

    Armageddon

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    Armageddon
    Brian Zahnd

    The second Sunday after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, I preached a sermon entitled “The Road To Armageddon.” During those days of grief and rage when I should have preached the gospel of peace and forgiveness, I instead resorted to the hackneyed trope of dispensationalism that claims a mega-war in the Middle East must occur before Jesus can return.

    I’ve repented and made amends for that pastoral failure, but the fact remains that my mistake was made possible by the terrible eschatology I had inherited. The Late Great Planet Earth and the Left Behind series are only the best known of countless books that have popularized the worst possible reading of Revelation.
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    No Comments / Eschatology, Revelation, Theology, Violence, War /

  • September 5, 2015

    The Book of Revelation

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    This week Group Publishing released the Jesus-Centered Bible — a study Bible in the New Living Translation. I wrote the introductions for Jonah, Matthew, Titus, and Revelation. Here’s the introduction I wrote for the book of Revelation.

    The Book of Revelation
    Brian Zahnd

    As a child growing up in church I didn’t always feel engaged by the sermon. On those occasions I would pull out the pew Bible and begin to read. And I always went to the same place — to the end of the Bible, to the mysterious book of Revelation. I was fascinated with its monsters and battles, its angels and demons, and its visions of heaven and hell that parade across the pages in the final installment of Christian Scripture. Like many others, I assumed I was reading some kind of un-deciphered code about the end times. I thought Revelation was a veiled foretelling of the geopolitical events of the late twentieth century.

    But I was mistaken.
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    10 Comments / Bible, Eschatology, Jesus /